At 07:07 a.m. 15/06/2004, you wrote:
>I have tested an ISP's implementation of it, and it failed miserably (around
>82% hit rate only for some reason (it should of got a lot higher knowing how
>D2S works).
>
>This bring another question. What kind of accuracy level _do_ users expect?

It depends on the user I suspect and how much spam they get. Also, what exactly do you mean by accuracy level? There are two accuracy levels so to speak, false positive rate and false negative rate (hit rate sounds like this). Personally, I would prefer a very low (non existant) false positive rate even if it means false negative is fairly high and even then, depending on the level, I'll probably still check all the positives to make sure they are spam. I think most ISPs do tend to target this level.

However, some people prefer very low false negative rates even if it makes a fairly high false positive rate. Most of these people do check their 'positives' of course altho at less frequently...

Bear in mind from a user point of view, what exactly is a false positive and negative is not always that clear cut. If it's an e-mail that interests them, they might consider it not spam even if it really is spam (personally, I'll never be interested in anything that is spam but this is obviously not true for everyone). And if it's a marketing e-mail that doesn't interest them even though they knowingly and willingly signed up for it (but are no longer interested in for whatever reason) they might consider it spam. It's really the content that matters. Some anti spam list claim a that there is no false positives with a anti spam list, just people you don't want to talk to but from a users pov this is unlikely to be the case... Personally, if it's not spam but is marked as spam (or possibly spam), that's a false negative and if it is spam but isn't marked as spam that's a false negative... Regardless of whether the e-mail interests me (although as said, spam never interests me exce
pt as an occasional laugh).

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