Clarify what MW2010 means by Blacklist

[JRuske]

Starting a new thread because this seems pretty murky to me.

Am I understanding correctly that items marked as Blacklisted are not intended to be marked for deletion on future runs by MW2010?

I'm asking because when I point out that items I have marked as Blacklisted are coming up in future runs coloured green and without deletion marked (MW 1.0.19) - an obvious UI error based on MW 5/6 behaviour - I'm getting feedback about setting up filters and autodeletion and some other things.

Blacklist has a meaning in the industry. The notion that MW is decoupling blacklist from deletion is pretty nifty and exciting - in a largely not intuitive and unexpected kind of way. While I can imagine there are some use cases for wanting to keep blacklisted email, I would have expected that to be exception rather than the rule.

So... what exactly does MW2010 think Blacklist means? And when a user marks an address or domain as Blacklisted, is it necessary to then set up additional steps (filters/autodelete) to mark those items for deletion?

Thanks!

[stan_qaz]

Blacklist in MW 2010 means that when a message matches your blacklist it has the number of bad points you have the blacklist set to award assigned to the message.

The other tools work the same way except for Bayesian/learning where it calculates a score and assigns it. You can set it to 149 or 99 maximum points.

For folks that want the function of the old MW blacklist all you need to do is create a filter, add a spam-tool rule for the blacklist and set the filter to always mark for deletion. This also works well if you enable message grouping based on the status column so all your blacklisted messages are grouped together for review.

Of course by doing that you do not get the benefit of the new weighting method of evaluating messages for any message that matches your blacklist.

For example I have posted a blacklist here as a starting suggestion that blacklists all country and other odd domains, with that adding 50 bad points to any messages that hit it helps the evaluation process tag these messages as spam even if the spammer has managed to bypass the other tools. If you get mail from any of these domains on a regular basis you can of course remove that from the list. I've added several domains that I get a lot of spam from to the blacklist too, most are spam but a few good ones do come in, I either have the known good ones protected in the friends list or by a filter.

The weighting is a whole new way of looking at spam for MW, more in line with premiere anti-spam services like Declude in the way it works. Hopefully more and more tools will be added to the mix over time to make MW even more effective.

[racker]

Starting a new thread because this seems pretty murky to me.

Am I understanding correctly that items marked as Blacklisted are not intended to be marked for deletion on future runs by MW2010?
(....)
Blacklist has a meaning in the industry. The notion that MW is decoupling blacklist from deletion is pretty nifty and exciting - in a largely not intuitive and unexpected kind of way. While I can imagine there are some use cases for wanting to keep blacklisted email, I would have expected that to be exception rather than the rule.
(....)
Thanks!

All innovations need a little time to get used to...
Personally I love the idea of being able to weigh messages instead of using blunt rules.

It's a bit similar to the innovations in traffic control:
The standard speed camera would flash as soon as you break the speedlimit, even if it's just for two seconds, for instance because you needed to rapidly overtake some slower vehicle.
The newer section control/traject control system looks at your average speed over a certain section of the road... a weighed speed control!

No... for me it's "away with the old black/white system!!". Luckily this program recognizes there's something like gray too (and many more colours to that.. ).

[JRuske]

Blacklist in MW 2010 means that when a message matches your blacklist it has the number of bad points you have the blacklist set to award assigned to the message.

For folks that want the function of the old MW blacklist all you need to do is create a filter, add a spam-tool rule for the blacklist and set the filter to always mark for deletion. This also works well if you enable message grouping based on the status column so all your blacklisted messages are grouped together for review.

Of course by doing that you do not get the benefit of the new weighting method of evaluating messages for any message that matches your blacklist.

For example I have posted a blacklist here as a starting suggestion that blacklists all country and other odd domains, with that adding 50 bad points to any messages that hit it helps the evaluation process tag these messages as spam even if the spammer has managed to bypass the other tools. If you get mail from any of these domains on a regular basis you can of course remove that from the list. I've added several domains that I get a lot of spam from to the blacklist too, most are spam but a few good ones do come in, I either have the known good ones protected in the friends list or by a filter.

The weighting is a whole new way of looking at spam for MW, more in line with premiere anti-spam services like Declude in the way it works. Hopefully more and more tools will be added to the mix over time to make MW even more effective.

Interesting interpretation of blacklist. Thanks for explaining what is going on. I'll need to ponder how best to use it, though the likely approach is to tackle the filter approach to get back to basics.

[stan_qaz]

That will work but you are still facing the spammers auto generators that crank out fake or stolen e-mail addresses by the millions, most of which are only used for one spam run. Really reduces the effectiveness of blacklisting specific spammers addresses. Non-spammers like aunt Tillie or wildcards for countries you don't care about are still of some value though.

[cfheinz]

I didn't create a filter.

I just went to Settings/Spam Tools/Spam Ratings and gave Blacklist a value of 200.