on friday NUMBER september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER skip montanaro wrote greg in case it wasn t obvious i m a strong proponent of filtering greg junk mail as early as possible ie right after the smtp data greg command has been completed filtering spam at the mua just seems greg stupid to me by the time it gets to me mua the spammer has greg already stolen my bandwidth the two problems i see with filtering that early are NUMBER everyone receiving email via that server will contribute ham to the stew making the bayesian classification less effective NUMBER given that there will be some false positives you absolutely have to put the mail somewhere you can t simply delete it i also don t like the tmda ish business of replying with a msg that says here s what you do to really get your message to me that puts an extra burden on my correspondents as an individual i would prefer you put spammish messages somewhere where i can review them not an anonymous sysadmin who i might not trust with my personal email nothing against you greg i personally prefer to manage this stuff at the user agent level bandwidth is a heck of a lot cheaper than my time i see no reason why both approaches could and should not be used mta level filtering would just need to use a different corpus one that would contain illegal or otherwise commonly unapproved material for the group of people using that mta i m sure that such an approach would significantly reduce the mail traffic as a first step without giving false positives mua corpus would then be personally trained although i d like the option of down loadable corpuses and merge functionality harri ps just joined the list so pardon if my thoughts have been hashed through before 