Have spam filters been trained over XMAS?

[#1]

Phil,
I fully realise why DSPAM is not cutting it now - I'd guess that to keep up the spammers, that type of solution would need training several times a day. You may also have seen my post on PUG which clearly shows how effective Postini is at detecting spam (but also shows that you need to do some more work on the Spam 1/2 tagging).
What I'm not sure you realise is how totally tee'd off many users not on Postini are with the current levels of spam. We're all used to seeing posts in the various forums from complaining about 20/30/40 spams a day getting through. Anybody seeing those levels now can consider themselves lucky.
At the beginning of December you removed Criticalpath - that action immediately gave an increase in the level of spam getting through for the people not on Postini. It may also be the case that in the weeks leading up to that event, certain types of emails were not being reported back as missed spam and fed in to the DSPAM training because they were blocked by Criticalpath. When CP was removed they all started flooding through and the training has been playing catch-up ever since. What was clearly needed was more intensive training - to make sure that spam was kept down to an appropriate level with the benefits of CP - instead you go a week over the Christmas period where no training is done at all.
Compounding that, and in spite of it being flagged up well before Christmas, you continued to train DSPAM with Postini headers. It would have been far better if Postini trialists spam/ham was not fed in to training. Instead we saw Plusnet representatives encouraging trialists to report spam/ham.
This week we are finally seeing some action to rectify some of the mistakes made and as I'm sure you are aware I believe that Postini is going to be very successful.
However, due to a combination of actions in some areas (removal of Criticalpath and duff training of DSPAM) and inaction in others (a failure to respond to the developing situation in the weeks immediately before and after Christmas) you have subjected many users to several weeks of misery with mailboxes overflowing with spam (tagged and untagged), and genuine emails tagged as spam (or lost if they had spam detection set to delete).
I really believe that Plusnet ought to be acknowledging to the users that they have failed them in the last few weeks.
Edit: Typo's corrected

[#2]

If people agree (or disagree) with me over this they may like to make there views known in the poll I've created:
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,59003.0.html

[#3]

It is a fact isn't it that reports of spam difficulties are being reported on a number of topics by many people. This is of course making the overall situation difficult for PlusNet to assess.
Would it help if all customers were advised of a single purpose built referral point, which is easy to access, so that there is a better view of what is going on.
Jelv has been looking at a number of different topics and seems to be getting information which it seems PlusNet may not be is aware of.
Is this something that moderators could co-ordinate?
Whatever could be done would be a great help.
I guess that most customers are not aware of how to go about reporting problems, this has been highlighted in other topics. For example, a well known difficulty when looking at the home page is to find out what to do.
This was emphasised at the Open Day. There may have been some changes but it is still very difficult to navigate easily to the right part.
The Postini trial did not include adequate facilities to report problems, in my view it is not good enough to assume that ordinary people who only want to successfully send and receive emails will be able to find their way in the website to tell PlusNet of problems. The staff who deal with questions were not kept upnto date on the Postini situation. 
Some customers who spend a lot of time on the website say that there are major difficulties in reporting problems.
How about trying to do something about it, with a high priority.

[#4]

Quote from: Bob

… Some customers who spend a lot of time on the website say that there are major difficulties in reporting problems. How about trying to do something about it, with a high priority.

PlusNet have now rolled out the initial phases of the mini-referrals update project (forum link and blog link). This took significant development effort in 2007 but with it out of the way PUG (PlusNet UserGroup) are pressing for improving the help assistant and ticket handling processes to follow.
PUGIT Issue 126 (with comment topic here) is seen as a starter for this work. One of the other issues is referred to in this Community post. The response from PlusNet has been positive, though we have no firm news to report at present.
The help assistant/ticket related issues in numerical order are 23, 40, 60, 126, 127, 193, 213, 278 and 279. The easiest way to locate these is to use the Active Item Index in the PUGIT Comments forum here. Comments are welcome there, please don't take this thread off-topic.

[#5]

Spraxyt,
I'm sorry if I am wandering in my observations. You comments show that relevant remarks about problems are scattered all over. You seem to have identified 9 or 10 different places.
You also mention PUGIT,  which is a total mystery to me. I'm sorry if I'm a bit thick.
If I may make bold, -- every now and again I seem to come across that something may be going to happen sometime, -- but don't ask when. I can't ask anyway because I don't know who or how to ask.
A number of unanswered questions are distributed all over these topics.
I am sorry also if I beleive it is up to PlusNet to answer queries.
I have difficulty in knowing what some topics are about, so I can't always 'keep to topic' as I think you are saying.
Happy New Year.