Was Calochortus Hybrids, now email filtering
Antennaria@aol.com (Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:06:37 PST)

In a message dated 11/9/04 10:42:09 PM Eastern Standard Time,
pbs-request@lists.ibiblio.org writes:
From: Mary Sue Ittner <msittner@mcn.org>
Subject: Re: [pbs] Calochortus Hybrids
To: Pacific Bulb Society pbs@lists.ibiblio.org

I was amused to just see that Bob Werra's post was just rejected by a
Queensland email program because it "was found to contain inappropriate
content". This email program has also rejected a number of Jim McKenney's
posts so apparently has a high standard for acceptable language

Hiya,

As one who works in an IT group supporting approx. 300 people, and the person
who strategically develops the spam filtering "dictionaries" for our email
system, I wouldn't read too much into the so-called "high standard for
acceptable language". Spammers use every trick in the book, so to combat their wily
tricks, one gets aggressive in adding words and phrases that are *weighted* to
fail the spam test. Since, in most systems that employ spam filtering in a
serious way, the email recipient can establish their own "accept list" or "white
list" of acceptable domains or specific email addresses, and as well, there is
a corporate "accept list" or "white list", there is considerable incentive to
be aggressive with the email filtering.

A year ago, in our 300-person firm, we averaged 12,000 spam messages per day.
Today, only a year later, we average 116,000 spam messages a day. Our users
have the ability to review their spam, and accept any messages or domain
names that were inappropriately quarantined. So far as the "feel-good" anti-spam
legislation that came out last year in the USA, it is of course, exactly
that... "feel good" but utterly ineffective legislation.

Mark McDonough Pepperell, Massachusetts, United States
antennaria@aol.com "New England" USDA Zone 5
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