On Nov 29, 2008, at 9:20 AM, Michael Thomas wrote:
Even if you could do something clever here, would it make much if
any operational difference? I got the impression from Mark Delany at
Y! that mailing list traffic is a drop in a very large ocean. I'm
guessing
that bulk mail is probably higher but still pretty much noise level to
large providers.
Without explicit whitelisting in place, wanted bulk mail (mostly
broadcast mail) is one of the biggest components of false positives
in spam filters (due to both traffic patterns and content).
Large providers expend quite a lot of effort to ensure delivery of
wanted bulk mail. If there were a magic wand they could wave
that would make all that free (or at least trivially automatable) then
they'd leap at it. That doesn't mean there's huge pent-up demand
for it, as the manual whitelisting approach mostly works, but there's
not total disinterest either.