advice on ignore-files

[Eric Seppanen]

> >I think it's still easy to demonstrate places where hand-maintained
> >wordlists are necessary.
> >
> >A few more examples I've thought of:
> >
> >- A user notices that a lot of spam messages came through
> >secondary.mail.mydomain.com.  While most mail comes through
> >primary.mail.mydomain.com, secondary is a legitimate mail machine and
> >the user wants to make sure it won't be used as an indicator of spam.
> >It shouldn't be whitelisted, however, because that would let some
> >spam through.  It needs to be treated as neutral- which is what the
> >ignore list does.  So the user adds secondary.mail.mydomain.com to
> >the ignorelist.
> >
> >- Joe sysadmin installs bogofilter for end-users, and wants to insure
> >they don't spam-list critical messages from him.  So he installs
> >bogofilter with a system-wide white-list so that his email address
> >will never be blocked on his own system.
> >
> >- Jane's email address gets used as the From: address in a bunch of
> >spam.  She can advise people using bogofilter to add her email
> >address to their ignore-list.  Then her mail can get through, while
> >spam with her address in it can still be safely filtered.
> 
> This sounds more like white-list entries.  If the address is on the list, 
> the message is good.

Actually, if you think about it, whitelisting is incorrect for the first 
and third examples above.

In both cases, you have a measureable amount of spam using a word that you 
don't want marked as "spammy".  If you do nothing, you may end up with 
good messages falsely tagged as spam.  If you whitelist that word, you 
will falsely tag any real spam as good.  The correct action is to 
explicitly ignore that word, and let the rest of the message be evaluated 
on its merits.