If you're providing large-scale commercial service (even if it's for free), users absolutely do demand that you filter out all the bad stuff and leave in all the good stuff without their having to exert any effort...and unless they're looking, they only notice when you make a mistake.
This has been leading me to think about e-mail in somewhat of a new way
-- it hasn't been good vs. bad for a long time, but even adding a middle
option isn't enough. These days I'm thinking that there are two binary
options: good/not good and bad/not bad. From a system-wide perspective,
either bit may be set independantly for any given message -- so yes,
a message can be both good and bad at the same time.
Only the end recipient can merge those two bits into a final judgement --
not the e-mail provider (though we try), and absolutely not the sender.
Any scheme where the provider tries to make the final judgement without
user input is going to lead inexorably towards the exact problems Neil's
talking about. As for letting the sender decide...heh.
The trick, of course, is how to get that user judgement without
inconveniencing the user. Fortunes will be made and lost as we try to
resolve that one.
A few days ago, my friend Neil gave a brief answer to the question "Spamfighter, howcome you got into spamfighting?" I get asked that a lot, too -- and while my answers vary depending on my mood at the time (and usually go on way longer than the questi
Tracked: Oct 21, 10:11
Some people -- some friends -- are going to ask why I left a particular anti-spam mailing list after eleven and a half years, and what that means. Here's a bit of a timeline: 19 October 1995I subscribed.cyberNOTHING.org was only about five months ol
Tracked: Mar 17, 22:39