On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 16:16 +1200, Andy Linton wrote:
He who pays the piper calls the tune?
Surely any business operating an email system does so for the benefit of the company/enterprise etc.
So the tune is the one that suits the enterprise's policy, but in many cases, Frank's one amongst them, the diversity of even the most narrowly focussed enterprise is beyond the wit of any filter. Indeed, if we could train a filter to recognise spam "better than a human," the long search for AI will be over.
Which brings us back to advice offered for example to people in Frank's position that they get the mail from this list directed to a hotmail etc account or run their own server where they can set policy for themselves.
Frank's role probably benefits from his NZNOG exposure, at the Department of Internal affairs there are policy wonks examining censorship and gamb^Hing issues that go home to do work. The UK parliament couldn't debate a proposed censorship bill due to MM's cretinism. In terms of filtering humiliation, my experience with that recently was *outbound*, an email containing the word "wealth" too many times, plus "naked" (in the sense of "without a job in this economy you are naked") was returned to me by the corporate mail police, with the self-serving reassurance that I should be grateful they stopped it, as it would "probably" have been rejected at the destination... Not true, as per Andy's suggestion, I more or less run my own email. One thread I have noticed running through this discussion is the scale issue. The smaller the safer. Perhaps if email was received on each workstation in the corporate, the human there, who is the final arbiter of the catch-all term "spam," could handle it, or at least make their own decisions about it. And its very reassuring to read there are operators who appreciate the requirement to serve customer diversity, rather than crush them all into some homogenised strait-jacket. Hamish. -- Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world. -- Hans Margolius