A picture is worth 1,000 words. And in the world of SPAM control I would have to say at least 27,429 (number of words in my SPAM bucket).
I first installed POPFile at the end of October. So this number comes after 3 full months of use. 99% is such a nice number.
I have not had a false positives in over a month, I just have had to add more SPAM to the corpus.
Article comments
1 - Thrillhouse
One of the first things I hear spammers (in the United States) whine about whenever someone proposes anti-spam legislation is the First Amendment. They claim it's a limitation on their right to free speech.
I think the First Amendment is one of the most important parts of the Constitution. But...
The Supreme Court has ruled that "commercial speech" (advertising and such) is not the same as other forms of speech, and can be regulated.
Remember when fax machines were new? People would constantly get "junk faxes". This wasn't allowed to go on for too long, because it tied up the machine and prevented legitimate faxes from getting through. It also cost people money, because they had to replace the paper, and the ink or toner. Back in the day, fax paper was *expensive*.
The costs aren't quite as simple to quantify today, but spam does cost money because it creates much more traffic on a mailserver than would be there otherwise. It slows things down, and sometimes forces administrators to add more capacity to their systems. It also reduces each and every user's efficiency, because they have to wade through an avalanche of spam, looking for the one or two legitimate messages in their inbox. If they're anything like me, they accidentally delete a "real" message now and then.
There's not a lot of room for debate on the topic. Spam should be regulated heavily, and we need to solve the problem of untraceable spam from offshore servers.