Subject: Re: [Asrg] Summary of junk button discussion

From: Ian Eiloart <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:52:03 +0000

--On 27 February 2010 14:08:37 +0100 Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Alessandro Vesely wrote:
>> On 27/Feb/10 07:22, Chris Lewis wrote:
>
>>
>>> I'm aiming for a specification that permits a single <user action> to
>>> communicate upstream for _both_ filtering and reporting purposes,
>>> where whether it's used for filtering or reporting or both in any
>>> given instance is up to the site admin and/or end-user.
>>
>> +1, and I would welcome an efficient IMAP implementation in that sense.
>> However, the spec should also allow to just send complaints.
>
> +1. "upstream communication is the idea". It's up to the (email
> address|device|...) to interpret how to interpret it and what to do with.

This is very sensible, but when you say "single <user action>", are you 
voicing support for the notion that only a single bit of data will be 
transmitted? Or will the vocabulary be richer than that? How about an 
extensible vocabulary?

For example, User Agents also have spam filters. It might be useful for 
such a filter to be able to make reports back to the administrator. Also, 
the user or the user's filter might want to say "this is not junk". Thus we 
have at least four messages that we might want to communicate to the admin. 
And, that's before we allow the user to express views on the type of junk 
that's present (boring versus offensive or potentially criminal).

-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
01273-873148 x3148
For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/

---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Mar 2010 19:25:08 -0000

>transmitted? Or will the vocabulary be richer than that? How about an 

If it sends an ARF report, you can put whatever you want in the ARF,
although I wouldn't want to attempt to standardize a lot of stuff that
nobody uses.  We already made that mistake with ARF, and one of the tasks
of the MARF WG is to strip out the useless crud.

>that's present (boring versus offensive or potentially criminal).

After years of experience with webmail junk buttons, the only messages
they've found useful are "junk" on regular messages and "not junk" on
stuff in the junk folder.  I don't see why MUA users would be any
different.  If you want to encode stuff in the ARF report to say whether
the opinion is from a human or from software, you can, although it is
again not clear how useful that would be.

R's,
John

---

From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:52:12 +0100

On 01/Mar/10 20:25, John Levine wrote:
>> This is very sensible, but when you say "single<user action>", are you voicing support for the notion that only a single bit of data will be transmitted? Or will the vocabulary be richer than that? How about an extensible vocabulary?
>
> If it sends an ARF report, you can put whatever you want in the ARF, although I wouldn't want to attempt to standardize a lot of stuff that nobody uses.

But what is the relationship between the report and the button? 
Apparently, "single<user action>" excludes automated reports.

> If you want to encode stuff in the ARF report to say whether the opinion is from a human or from software, you can, although it is again not clear how useful that would be.

That field may be useful in sorting out a report's consumers in a 
generalized FBL. Some mailbox providers notify via FBL when users hit 
that button, but not when messages are automatically blocked.

Also, humans make errors in a different way than software, hence any 
correction mechanism should be differently tailored.

---

From: Ian Eiloart <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:49:50 +0000

> again not clear how useful that would be.

To me, as an administrator, I'd give more weight to a human opinion. In 
part, that's because the human is less likely to actually see a message 
that the client filter had spotted. It's the hard to spot email that I want 
to inspect.

I still want to know why Twitter's experience - which distinguishes between 
"block" and "report" isn't useful in this context. They seem like clear 
distinctions to me, and they're verbs, not adjectives, so they make 
explicit the resultant action. For privacy reasons, I think it's important 
that people are aware that a report is being made.

Now I think of it, "junk" is a verb, too, so its use in a button could 
easily be misinterpreted as equivalent to "trash" - less strong than either 
"block" or "report".