Jeff Chan wrote to SURBL Discuss:
On Monday, October 25, 2004, 3:46:58 PM, Bret Miller wrote:
Having a URIBL that hits some ham means that I may, as with other rules, have to whitelist more senders. OTOH, not having one means that users will receive more spam, which is complained about far more here than FPs.
The problem with FPs is that they may prevent a message from ever arriving. Absent a telephone call or some other communication, a falsely blocked legitimate message may never get discovered. FPs are far more damaging than false negatives (spam that gets through undetected). Therefore it's much better to get a little spam than to get legitimate messages blocked.
Jeff, are you trolling on your own mailing list? :-)
You're still speaking (and possibly thinking) in terms of outright blocklists, which is what SURBL is designed to be. UC, contrarily, is designed be used as a spam indicator, in conjunction with other spam and ham indicators in classifiers like SpamAssassin. I really don't think I need to explain how this works, nor need I validate its usefulness.
Feel free to join uc-discuss (info on http://uc.sasknow.com/) if you'd like to get a better idea of what we're up to, or even chime in.
- Ryan