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The micro-guide to spam terminology: false positives, false negatives, and true stuff

If you were woken in the middle of the night and told about an annoying false positive you would immediately realize that your spam filter had been a bit over-eager.

For many though, spam terminology is a teensy bit confusing. This probably has a lot to do with the naming convention: When spam is detected this is “positive” – But spam is a not a very positive thing. And of course legitimate email is “true negative”. Very intuitive…

Therefore in the interests of greater global understanding we present the above info-drawing-thingy.