Graham's spam filter

[Mark McEahern]

[Anthony Baxter]
> This [whitelist] technique is evil, and fails to scale in any useful way.

Evil?  Would you like cream with your hyperbole or do you just prefer it
black?

Please be more descriptive; otherwise I--and perhaps I'm not alone--really
have no idea what you mean by "evil", "scale", and "useful."  What on earth
do most people need with an email technique that "scales" anyway?  Perhaps
my attempt to guess your meaning is completely orthogonal to what you
implicitly mean--but then, how would I know?  <wink>

> I know that if I'm emailing someone who uses one of these systems, I won't
> bother. I have too much to do as it is.

Well, and I don't mean this snidely, then perhaps the technique serves its
purpose by filtering you out; i.e., since you don't care that much, perhaps
what you had to say was not that important?  Seriously, if you can't be
bothered to reply once, then maybe you weren't all that interested in
contacting the person.  I know I wouldn't mind doing this.  I have a
relatively limited set of people who I contact regularly.  It would be
annoying if I had to reply each time--presumably, they could add me to a
list so that I would only have to reply once.

> Especially irritating is when someone emails _you_, and your
> response needs
> to go through this level of filtering.

Edward's original email pointed out this was not necessary.

Cheers,

// mark

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