spam filter false positives
I get a lot of false positives in my spam filters. Enough that if I simply ignored the spam filter it would quickly become a liability. I was wondering if there's any way it can be modified.
I mentioned this in a previous email and the response was to ask
for a few specific cases. I have the most recent four that I
found.
Here are the links to items that have recently been marked positive
but aren't:
https://yourhead.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/1093-collage2-a...
https://yourhead.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/1145-entering-m...
https://yourhead.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/1325-accordion-...
https://yourhead.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/1732-download-p...
I know I always hate it when customers throw out random guesses at their problems, but I'm going to do it anyway. ;-)
It sure seems like occasionally, after marking a few items to move to the trash or to a specific queue, that the inbox is displayed again before the job has completed.
And I guess I have this worry that perhaps the items that are displayed is out of sync with the server. I'm concerned that if I then move other items to the trash or mark them as spam -- that the incorrect items might be moving instead of those that I intended.
My guess is that this worry is unfounded, but it sure seems like unexpected things change sometimes after a larger "submit"
Isaiah
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1 Posted by Isaiah on 18 Feb, 2010 04:41 PM
More:
Recently, on my mail server I installed a postgres filter. It removes some of the paypal notifications that get sent when sales are made.
Unfortunately paypal refuses to send these to a different address other than the one that we use as our public address and you don't have any filtering (yet!). So a mail-server filter seemed like the only option.
However, since installing the filter something seems to have triggered even more spam filtering. The spam filter has flagged EVERY item as spam over the past 12 or so hours.
I'm really stuck between a rock and hard place: if I turn off the filter, I get lots of notifications that I have to delete and fear deleting incorrect items. If I leave the filter on I must manually move everything out of the spam folder or disable the spam filter and manually move many things in.
Mostly it's frustrating because spam filtering and mail filters/rules seem like a problem that most mail-tools solved a very long time ago.
Isaiah
Support Staff 2 Posted by Courtenay on 19 Feb, 2010 01:10 AM
Sometimes the job takes a little while to process, because there are a few things that have to happen when you unspam or change category. We're looking at ways to improve the response time and UI experience of this job.. it annoys me, too.
Try adding the email which is sending these messages as a user -- i.e., create a user with that email address. Also, filtering was deployed last night. It's in site settings - filters.
Do you actually get a lot of spam? Or are you using the spam box to store things?
Support Staff 3 Posted by Courtenay on 19 Feb, 2010 01:18 AM
OK, you do seem to get a lot of spam.
I have a few potential solutions:
Create accounts using our API for your all users and set them as 'trusted'. This way their incoming email will be not marked as spam; see https://help.tenderapp.com/faqs/api/users
Using webhooks, have an API on your side that answers the webhook looks up user email addresses. When messages come in, check to see if the user is a customer. If so, make an API response that un-marks the message as spam.
4 Posted by Isaiah Carew on 19 Feb, 2010 01:33 AM
Your solutions are quite impractical.
> - Create accounts using our API for your all users and set them as 'trusted'. This way their incoming email will be not marked as spam; see https://help.tenderapp.com/faqs/api/users
I have aprox. 100K active users. That would be a lot of typing.
> - Using webhooks, have an API on your side that answers the webhook looks up user email addresses. When messages come in, check to see if the user is a customer. If so, make an API response that un-marks the message as spam.
With 100K users and growing this would be a backend database challenge that would border on the complexity of your service. I have many customers. Their addresses change often.
Furthermore, it does not cover the large percentage of pre-sales questions that I receive. The most important questions I get are from people I don't know that I hope to make into customers.
As I've said, the difficult part to swallow is that I'm paying a monthly fee for this. And spam filtering doesn't seem to be a challenge for the free mail software that ships with my computers. Mac OS X Mail usually left only a few spam in my inbox per week and over the past 5 years I have not had the number of false positives that your service has had in the past 24 hours.
I can try various techniques on my end, but you must admit that your filter is performing rather poorly compared to the rest of the industry here, no?
isaiah
http://twitter.com/isaiah
Support Staff 5 Posted by Courtenay on 19 Feb, 2010 02:01 AM
The spam filter only runs on email addresses that it hasn't seen before and therefore can't trust; hence my solution about programatically creating users.
We use the
akismetservice to check for spam; it learns when you mark things as spam or ham, and it works well for us and most of our customers, despite not being perfect. We use a service rather than building and running our own so we can focus on building features that are more important to the core of customer support. The tradeoff here is that we can't customize it other than by training. Some of our customers run their own spam filters on incoming email (such as SpamAssasssin or just forwarding through GMail) so that they can specifically tweak the rules to suit their own individual requirements, and I'd strongly suggest this course of action to you.If Tender isn't working out for you, then we'll be sorry to see you move to another service.
Will closed this discussion on 18 Aug, 2010 10:10 PM.