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

Perhaps the information presented above is 100% familiar to you.  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.