False negatives

Andy, in the comments on those Postini posts I made late last week, asked about false negatives, email that got blocked as spam but really wasn’t. I told him that since I don’t use my email account to get newsletters or other “bulk” type emails, my account may not be the best measurement of how that’s working. After a few days of having all the accounts loaded in there, it appears that of the 1,077 messages blocked by Postini, only 13 have been manually delivered by users, so we’re talking about 1.2% of all messages. I suspect that after some use, some initial identification of what are legit newsletters and whitelist creation by users that number will all but disappear.

Update: After some discussion, maybe I should be talking about “false positives” as opposed to false negatives, but whatever you want to call it, I’m talking about items marked as spam that really aren’t. Mmkay?

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