Unacceptably high rate of false positives with Junk filter set on low

  • Thread starter Thread starter Al
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Al

FWIW: I did a check on the email received overnight. The accounts hooked to
Vista Windows Mail only get mail from Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups. Here
is the break down
15 False Positives
1 False Negative (HURRAY!)
6 True Positives so its error rate is 14%. That's not good but it's ok.
(The pro's strive for 5% but this sample is really small)
81 True Negatives so its error rate is 16% - suspiciously similar to 14%
(The pro's strive for something well under 1%)

Conclusion unless the junk filter vastly improves before production, I'll
recommend to my readers and clients that they keep it off. I can't imagine
what it would be like set to high. I'll let things go for a bit and then
switch to high. The WM developers goofed this setting up before, perhaps its
backwards.

Here is similar study for Outlook. However, it is skewed because for obscure
reasons I get soooo much junk mail there. The signal is a very small
fraction of the noise. On a really good day I get 10 pieces of real mail.
(For the same time period as the above study I got
0 False Positives
1 False Negative
120 True Positives (I told you I got a lot of junk)
0 True Negatives (My daily NY Times and WP briefings aren't in yet:-(((

False positives in this situation are a royal pain because there is so
little signal and so much noise. UNFORTUNATELY Outlook occasionally treats
mail from Microsoft as junk!!!! So I regularly look in the junk box for
stuff from Microsoft whatever.

NOTE TO MS LURKERS: I will cheerfully provide samples of what I got if you
are interested in seeing what's happening.

REPEATED NOTE TO MS LURKERS: There will be major difficulties if the False
Positive rate for MSN community mail is one iota different than for
competing list mail.

Regards,
Al
 
Buenas tardes: *Al* escribió:
FWIW: I did a check on the email received overnight. The accounts hooked to
Vista Windows Mail only get mail from Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups. [..]
Conclusion unless the junk filter vastly improves before production, I'll
recommend to my readers and clients that they keep it off.
Click to expand...
Here is similar study for Outlook. However, it is skewed because for obscure
reasons I get soooo much junk mail there.
Click to expand...

It would be really interesting if you did a comparison of Windows Mail
and Outlook with the exactly same email messages! Because I was under
the impression that the Junk Mail filter is a component used throughout
all products from Microsoft, i.e. the filter should be identical in
Windows Mail, Outlook and even Exchange.

The differing results you now are seeing may really be based on the
quite different types of emails you receive with both programs.
REPEATED NOTE TO MS LURKERS: There will be major difficulties if the False
Positive rate for MSN community mail is one iota different than for
competing list mail.
Click to expand...

Hehehe, right, watch them closely! ;-)

Saludos
Roland
 
If you educate it by right clicking the message in the Junk Mail folder and
choosig to add sender to the safe list it gets better pretty rappidly.
 
Thanks for the hint on adding the sender. The problem with mailing lists is
that there are a lot of posters and you would have to approve everyone.

Some junk mail filters allow white listing IP addresses. Since Yahoo! Groups
publishes its list of server IP's, I wonder if there is a way of using that
information?

Regards,
Al
 
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