First Alert - am I doing all the work?

NellieIrrelevant · Private Joined: Mar 31, 2003 Posts: 37 Location: UK

I already posted this in Mailwasher Troubleshooting, so my apologies for repeating myself, but this appears to be the more appropriate section.

I was delighted to learn that MWPro had enabled auto-delete for user filters. However I haven't enabled it yet because you can't do that, it seems, and contribute to First Alert. I have enabled autodelete on First Alert, but it's like the old days of MW - I have to do an enormous amount by hand. In the last 36 hours I got 60 spams that I reported. When I turn off auto-delete I see that about 15% of spam is known by First Alert.

My question is, what's in it for me? Unless the known spam ratio increases to 90%, when my free sub to First Alert expires, I will be doing all this work by hand identifying spam, for the benefit of others, and paying for the privilege.

I had this preposterous thought that the sub to FA should be variable. If you report 100 spams that are verified as spam you should be credited with $1 off your sub. At least then I'd have an incentive to help out. Otherwise, I'll just switch on userfilter auto-delete, which doesn't have any option to report spam to FA. But I haven't got time to contantly check and verify spam, especially when it hangs around on the server till I do and gets picked up by other machines on my home LAN.

Am I missing something here?

stan_qaz · Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2003 11:12 am Post subject:

The hit rate for me has dropped from 40% under the CFS beta to 15% under the First Alert trial. I think this is due to tweaking and changes back at the main database, one of the reasons they made the offer of free use was to get the database loaded with spam fingerprints, the other may have been because they expected the drop in identified known spam as they went to more users.

Stick with the program and report what you have time for to First Alert until the program stabilizes, hopefully before the end of the year. If hit rates don't climb back to 40-50% fairly soon I'm sure we will all hear of changes being made to get it back to that level or above.

While you have the spam up to look at try the spamcop reporting feature, my reporting there has resulted in most of my spam triggering the spamcop RBL. Pretty nice but not ready for auto-delete use as spammers have been known to poison the RBL by submitting valid e-mails.

Ikeb

Wayward

CM · Guest

Ikeb · Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 3:14 am Post subject:

I also appaude altruism. But I still think it's foolish to base the success of a service on this aspect of our human condition.

NellieIrrelevant · Private Joined: Mar 31, 2003 Posts: 37 Location: UK

I believe in altruism too. If we all clean up the litter in the park the park will be wonderfully tidy (and I have, literally, excuse the pun.) But if I'm picking up 90% by myself I soon start to feel like a sap and wonder why I'm paying taxes to the town council.

My point is, that if FA id's and auto deletes 90% of spam then I will happily report my 10% and feel I am Doing My Bit. If its hit ratio slips then so does my faith.

But it's hard to assess how much FA is doing, when its actions are not easily identified in the log.

stan_qaz · Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 11:49 am Post subject:

First Alert activity is shown on the statistics page.

First Alert has its own line, the first one, in the summary and is shown on the pie chart of the junk mail tab too.

Hit rate slowly climing 15.2% for the week with blacklist and spam cop getting 46 and 33 percent, everything else is under 10 percent each.

NellieIrrelevant · Private Joined: Mar 31, 2003 Posts: 37 Location: UK

Ah yes... hadn't done me homework. The pie chart says First Alert caught 30% of all spam in the last week, and my own filters caught about 60%.

The fact remains that I am still doing too much reporting. If I automatically take out the ads for meds and mortgages which seem to be 70% of the spam getting through, it will make my job easier, but I can't automate the process without cutting First Alert out of the loop. It seems then the two most powerful features of MW Pro are mutually exclusive.

My filters are currently twice as effective as FA. I have been monitoring them for false positives for three days now. If I don't spot any soon, I will switch them to automatic, and FA will have to spot spams without me.

polyglory · Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 4:00 pm Post subject:

I don't use filters, past that stage.

I continue doing it manually and now seeing increasing results of known spam coming up, so I guess the members are working for the members to improve the product as it should be and certainily thats why I joined the test.

Horses for Courses Smile

stan_qaz · Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2003 5:13 pm Post subject:

Spamcop works the same way, folks willing to contribute to the community make things better for each other. Folks that don't contribute are welcome to piggyback off the system too since they don't cause much expense or problems.

First alert can't offer the free part that spamcop does only due to the second live body added to the reporting chain otherwise it is the same concept.

Don't feel you are being a bad person by not contributing, you aren't, but anything you can contribute would help. Even just reporting the spam that you have to look at is going to help.

Guest

First Alert currently catching 20% for me; another 70% caught by RBL. If the numbers don't start increasing sometime soon i'll have to go back to my tuned SpamAssassin which was getting 95% or more. I get about 1000 spams a week, so FA lets 800 through to obscure everything that's legit.

Maybe i should set up a filter that automatically hides and reports anything caught by SpamAssassin.

stan_qaz · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 6:56 pm Post subject:

You can't set a filter to report but setting a status so you can mark them should save you some time.

CuZnStick · Joined: Dec 05, 2003 Posts: 0 Location: USA

Thanks for posting, Nellie. You put very well what I wanted to say. I've been reporting way over 90% of my spam, so I'm beginning to think I'm working only for everyone else's benefit. I do think First Alert is worth hanging in there for during this "tweaking" period, but I believe that eventually there will be a need for some kind of an incentive to get all who benefit to do their share.

Ikeb · Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2003 4:14 pm Post subject:


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