On Feb 26, 2009, at 5:08 PM, J.D. Falk wrote:
Blocking an entire site just because one John Doe user clicked a button they don't even understand just does not make sense.
You're right -- but Yahoo! has a sufficiently large userbase that they can count multiple complaints before blocking anything. Same story with AOL, and Hotmail, and Cloudmark, and many others who've used this technique for years.
This does not appear to be the case from external observation. It may be in some cases that multiple reports are necessary, but it certainly seems there are hair-triggers in others. For instance, see the message from Eric Esslinger. As for not black-holing anything, I haven't personally verified with Yahoo!, but others have reported that they do. It's pretty common from what I've seen to simply make very high-scored messages disappear and only send the mid-range stuff to the spam folder. Hotmail, as mentioned, does this. One of the very large hosted filtering services does as well. I'm not saying it's bad (it makes sense if you can trust your scoring algorithm), but it does happen. Just because you get _some_ stuff in your spam folder doesn't mean that's all the spam that was blocked. -- bk