What is spam? (was: [bogofilter] ESF and redundancy)

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Tom Allison <tallison at tacocat.net> wrote:

>But is it spam?
>
>Anti-virus scanner to catch virus'
>Spam filter to catch spam.
>
>When I was using razor, a lot of people would report Debian posts that 
>were auto-replies and unsubscribe requests as spam.  While not exactly 
>desired email, it wasn't exactly UCE either.
>
>Practically speaking, I found doing this to be rather ineffective 
>against virus' and tended to screw up my spam filtering effectiveness as 
>well.  Installing clamav fixed both problems.

I don't subscribe to this point of view. I need the filter
to block unwanted mail of every kind. I do use a virus
scanner (but with limited effect) and catch mails with
"wrong" file types, but that is only the beginning. There
are virus mails with the virus itself removed, there are
bounces to viruses and bounces to spam. If bogofilter would
not take care of them, I could stop using it right away. But
luckily, it works, and my error rate is in the magnitude of
one in a thousand.

pi