[Dialogue] Filter still working wonderfully!

[Tim Wegner]

Ruth wrote:

> I've been perplexed for months as to why I don't receive the 
> Dialogue
> and OE lists; I've just discovered that my ISP's junk collector keeps
> them each week, and I've believed that it was all spam that I was
> tossing away having once upon a time, many moons ago, gone through the
> "junk" and manually moved all the addresses that were "good".

Once again, as much as I don't like to discuss list problems on the 
list, this is such a tough problem that discussing it is unavoidable.

My ISP (Internet Service Provider), SBC, uses Yahoo for my mail 
server. Yahoo sorts what it thinks is spam into a "bulk" folder which 
I can access on a web page. I can train the filter by marking mail in 
my inbox as spam, or by marking mail in the bulk folder as not spam, 
and the spam filter learns. (Note: the spam filter is nothing to do 
with the "filter" in the subject line of this message - David Zahrt 
was talking about the list software's tendency to exclude other than 
plain text. Here we are talking about a spam filter operated by your 
internet provioder (ISP) - sorry, I'm sure everyone's confused now!)

Recently I too have been finding many dialogue list messages in my 
spam "bulk" folder. The crowning blow was one of my own posts earlier 
today, when it came back to me, ended up being tossed as spam!!

> Oh well,
> now one of you geniuses can tell me how to make sure my Dialogue and
> OE  junk mail filtered out by my ISP can be saved without my having to
> go to their web site and checking everyday or every week.

You can turn off the spam filter, which is tough solution. My Yahoo 
spam filter catches a tremendous amount of mail. I don't want to turn 
it off.

The Yahoo spam filter lets you add sender emails to an address book 
which prevents messages from those addresses being sorted as spam, 
and eventually you'd be caught up.

Other suggestions - you can access the list archives at 

http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/
http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/

you can also have the list messages sent to you as "digests" every 
few days - presumably this would be less likely to be mis-identified 
as spam.

Having gone to all the trouble to get us off Topica,  I hestitate to 
suggest another change, but here's something to consider. Len Hockley 
and I are evaluating software that has (among other facilities) on-
line forums via the web. This would solve the "filter" problems we've 
been discussing. But the cost is great - you'd have to go through 
another change in how to access our oe/dialogue news. You'd have to 
browse the discussion on the web at www.wedgeblade.net. It's not 
hard, but it's a change, and we'd probably lose a few people. Just 
like those others we lost at the Gorge of Morbio Inferiori (just 
seeing who's paying attention ... ).

We're not close to deciding to do that, and I'm not ready to give up 
on mailman (yet). Just to let you know we're investigating.

Tim