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Filtering SPAM mail with an acceptable false positive and false negative rate is part of the service. Unfortunately for you, the e-mail providers' customers (t

by tytso 7y ago

Filtering SPAM mail with an acceptable false positive and false negative rate is part of the service. Unfortunately for you, the e-mail providers' customers (the users receiving the mail) get to decide what is an unacceptably high false positive/negative rate --- and not you. If e-mail recipients get too much SPAM or if they get mail that they want landing in their Spam folder too often, then they will switch. This provides the economic incentive for mail providers to Get Things Right. Unfortunately, there is so much spam out there that if you are too relaxed with letting marginal e-mails (or e-mails from marginal network neighborhoods through) the false negative rate could result in so much spam in users' inbox that they will get mad, and switch. However, it can happen that the email provider can be too sensitive, and there can be too high of a false positive rate. For example MIT recently tried relying Microsoft's spam filtering system. Way too much stuff landed in the spam filter, and while you could go to the spam filter and manually mark e-mails as "not spam" and eventually Microsoft's ML algorithms would hopefully figure it out, the false positive rate was too high and the MIT community (especially the ones with the real power, e.g., the professors) rose up with an outcry, and MIT abandoned using Microsoft's Spam filtering service.

EvanAnderson 7y ago
My experience is that the email provider's customers have very little say in the matter. I deal with complaints from Customers who use Office 365 and Gmail about false positives regularly. They aren't MIT-profile Customers, so their complaints are ignored. The complaint usually turns into "Why can't this sender just use Google or Microsoft for their email like 'everybody' else?"
- tytso 7y ago
  It depends on the customer. If you're an Office 365 customer who is a major enterprise with huge numbers of paid users, and your CIO goes golfing with Microsoft board members, you have a huge amount of power. Similarly, if you are an MIT Professor you have vast amounts of power. They can be pile driving right next to the machine room, and causing disk drive errors, and Physical Plant won't care if the I/T folks complain. But if some Sloan School professors complained that it was disturbing their cogitations, it immediately stopped and Phys. Plant called a "stakeholder meeting" and it was really obvious who had the power. All customers are equal, but some customers are more equal than others.

by tytso 7y ago

EvanAnderson 7y ago

My experience is that the email provider's customers have very little say in the matter. I deal with complaints from Customers who use Office 365 and Gmail about false positives regularly. They aren't MIT-profile Customers, so their complaints are ignored. The complaint usually turns into "Why can't this sender just use Google or Microsoft for their email like 'everybody' else?"

tytso 7y ago
It depends on the customer. If you're an Office 365 customer who is a major enterprise with huge numbers of paid users, and your CIO goes golfing with Microsoft board members, you have a huge amount of power. Similarly, if you are an MIT Professor you have vast amounts of power. They can be pile driving right next to the machine room, and causing disk drive errors, and Physical Plant won't care if the I/T folks complain. But if some Sloan School professors complained that it was disturbing their cogitations, it immediately stopped and Phys. Plant called a "stakeholder meeting" and it was really obvious who had the power. All customers are equal, but some customers are more equal than others.