Re: IMF and UceArchive folder

"Alex Zammit" <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I sounds like you are taking this a bit personal. Hope you don't.

Nope, not at all. I do object to the tone in you reply, though.

>> That you've never seen this doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
>
>That I have never seen that makes me doubt on the validity of your
>quotation.

Well, I'm glad we're not taking this personally.

The URL and the information it offers are not mine. If you dispute the
results you should take that up with the entities that provided the
test results. I'll bet the data they pass through the software's
standardized and the results repeatable.

If not, use the input to SpamAssassin's spam/ham tests and rank the
results yourself.

>> Yes, they would -- unless cost was the only driving factor. That zero
>> price-point sways a lot of people. I use it here on my servers at
>> home, but certainly not in production.
>
>Do you have 11% false positives?

I also "front-end" my servers with FreeBSD and Postfix (which removes
a lot of the stuff that waltzes right through IMF). Anything I see
hitting the IMF is not raw data. I'm also not in the business of
testing and measuring other peoples software.

>> The figures are there for you to disprove. They aren't mine. Go for
>> it.
>
>I followed the link. These guys are quoting MCP magazine. I tried to follow
>the link to the review but couldn't find it (I am not saying that it is not
>there.) Can you forward me the link to the review?

Why not ask the operator of the web site?

I had little trouble finding the article
(http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=756&page=1) some
of which is quoted here:

"Of the 541 messages in the GoodMail database, 62 percent (332
messages) were given a completely clean score of 0 by the IMF. Another
138 got a score of 1-3, making them almost certainly not spam. That
left 71 messages, or 13.1 percent of the total, with sufficient
spamminess to make them interesting for analysis. Because I had
already purged this database of spam, this 13.1 percent represents
potential false positives in the SCL range of 4-7."

You're free to debate the results with the magazine and the author.

>> BTW, spam varys a lot from company to company, and country to country.
>> How well does IMF fare with Japanese spam? German? Dutch? And the spam
>> we receive may be quite different to the spam you receive.
>
>Agreed. This is exactly what I am saying. One cannot just say 11% false
>positives without looking into the specific organization.

Nope. But you can feed each of the spam filters the same set of data
and measure the results. What's ham is ham and it shouldn't be marked
otherwise.

>In my previous
>post I mentioned ways of getting a high rate of false positives as well.

Getting false positives is easy. Eliminating them is hard. Harder
still if you intend to keep a respectable detection rate on spam.

>I would like to see if the review you are quoting has indeed looked into
>different setups.

You need only look.

>> I doubt it. Well, maybe if he's never used anything else.
>
>Well he answerred you saying that he is not getting that many false
>positives.

He didn't cite volumes, either. And one or two days isn't long enough
for users to figure out they aren't getting the mail they expect,
especially if he's archiving the message and not marking them for
users to get feedback on the results.

>This has nothing to do on whether he used anything else. Do you
>want to tell me that you know more than him?

About what? Yeah, I know more than he does about the subject simply
because I've been at it longer. Ask him again in a year or two. If
he's happy, he's happy. But if he's never investigated anything else
he won't know any different.

>> I was citing published data, not making a "blanket statement". You're
>> stating an opinion. Now back it with some facts. You should also
>> disclose that you're selling products that enhance the IMF.
>
>True I am stating my opinion based on my experiece. This is backed on what
>my clients say to me. You are free to take it or leave it

I'll leave it. Thanks.

>You have provided no facts either you simply pasted a link. Can you provide
>some hard facts yourself??

Since I don't IMF except very casually, no. As I said, I'm not testing
software.

>You can easily find who I am by looking at my address of this post. My name
>is in many places on the web and the links are public.

It says you're a "Software Development Consultant" in your sig. It
doesn't say "I sell software that modifies he behavior of the IMF".

>I have been developing Exchange applications for many years and I have no
>problem arguing this issue in detail if necessary. Lets stick to the "11%
>false positves" issue just to make sure that we get something useful out of
>this discussion.

You're barking up the wrong tree. If you dispute the finding of the
people that did the testing, then do your own test and refute theirs.
I'm not selling anything and anything I'd reccomend would be
considered too expensive and dismissed immediately by most of the
people that read this newsgroup.

>> BTW, you should understand the 11% is a measurement of how much of
>> "known good" (i.e. ham) is determined to be spam, not 11% of all
>> messages examined. There's quite a bit of difference there. But you
>> knew that after you read the information, right?
>
>Since you are quoting my links I think you should immagine that I know that.

Sorry, but thise were my words, not quotes from your web site. I did
click on the link in your sig last night, but not to plagerize
anything.

>What 11% means is that if you look at the Junk Email folder (lets assume
>gateway blocking is disabled) out of every 10 emails filtered you will find
>a bit more than one good (ham) email.

'Fraid not. It means that for every 10 good messages about one of them
will be miscategorized as spam. It has nothing to do with how many
message that are truely spam are categoized as spam.

>> Nothing like a little self aggrandizement, huh?
>
>As I told you my links are public. I have no problem challenging your 11%
>statement.

You keep insisting that it's *my* statement. I may point out that
there's information stating that figure, but it's not *mine*.

>Hope you will stick to the argument rather than truning this into
>something personal.

Sure, just as soon as you stop telling me that I'm the one that's
wrong. If you quibble with the information published by others, refute
that. Don't try to make it my problem.

--
Rich Matheisen
MCSE+I, Exchange MVP
MS Exchange FAQ at http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm
Don't send mail to this address mailto:h.pott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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