[Elecraft] Simple-minded SPAM filters vs. list participation

[Brian Mury]

On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 10:25 -0500, Don Wilhelm wrote:
> Sorry, but I beg to differ with you.  If someone asks me for my help, I do
> not expect to fill out any forms to provide that assistance - and I will
> not.

I agree completely. Those challenge emails are generally considered to
be poor netiquette, and many people will not be bothered to reply to the
challenge (myself included).

There is another issue - what if we are both using this type of spam
blocking? You won't see my email until I reply to your challenge, but I
won't see your challenge until you reply to my challenge in response to
your challenge - so we will never establish communications.

> There are many very good and effective spam filters out there - I use
> Spambayes, and after a very short period of training, I have no false
> positives and all but a very few unsolicited emails are properly classified
> as Junk.

Any form of Bayesian filtering is highly accurate once trained. I use
SpamAssassin, which combines Bayesian filtering with other filtering
methods. I get hundreds of spam a week, but I usually only see one every
few weeks. However, it never flags ham as spam.

My one and only contribution to this off-topic thread, back to playing
with my K2... :-)