Hi there Paul. I'm currently maintaining the SpamAssassin project for Justin Mason while he's off on vacation. He's the guy, by the way, who jokingly put the "profit is dirty" message on his webpage.
I got pointed to your webpage http://www.talkbiz.com/assassin.html and went there to read it. I thought I'd point out your page is factually innacurate in a few places: 1. SpamAssassin does not block mail. There is no facility for blocking or bouncing mail in SpamAssassin, and blocking or bouncing is highly discouraged both in the documentation, and on the SpamAssassin mailing list. All examples of using SpamAssassin suggest having SpamAssassin mark messages it believes are spam, and then *deliver them anyway*, letting the human user read the message and decide for themselves if it's really SPAM before it's deleted. In cases where people have the mail filed off to a separate folder, we strongly urge them to tell their users to regularly check their SPAM folders to ensure that nothing got misfiled. 2. Not having a Reply-to header is not a rule. Having a Reply-to header which has no address in it is the rule I think you're referring to. That's certainly a lot more unusual, and is a strong sign that the person sending the email wants to make it hard for people to respond to the message. No legitimate email program that I know of allows users to send emails with empty Reply-to headers. Not missing, empty. 3. You do eventually get around to mentioning that any individual rule of the ones you mention won't cause an email to be flagged as spam. The scoring system SpamAssassin uses is optimized to detect combinations of rules being triggered in ways that signal a message is spam. Unsubscribe instructions alone won't do it. Just having a tollfree number in the message won't do it. Merely having your subject in ALL CAPS won't do it. Combining lots of these things will do it. And then, under the default configuration, the message subject will just get tagged to indicate that SpamAssassin thinks the message is spam. Nothing gets deleted or bounced. 4. SpamAssassin exposes many different ways for ISPs to ensure that their individual users can control the way their incoming mail is analyzed. Everything from letting users set their own thresholds through letting users provide their own whitelists/blacklists for people they do/don't want to receive mail from, through allowing them to set the scores they want to assign to individual rules (including 0 to disable a rule if they want). In all of the installations I know of, these controls are exposed to users, and the ISP makes it very clear to users how to make use of those systems. If you know of ISPs that do not allow their users to do this, I agree they should, and I'd be happy to join you in urging them to be more considerate of their customers. In addition to the above factual errors in your essay, you take a very defamatory tone against the "author of the package". I am one of the authors of the package, and while like you, I'm not an attorney, I strongly suspect you're verging on libel, if you haven't in fact crossed the line. I'm not a litigious person by nature, and I do occasionally go off on rants about things myself, but I just want to try and make it clear to you that while I'm at the helm of the SpamAssassin project, I will continue to endeavor to make sure that SpamAssassin minimizes tagging of nonspam as spam. We make very strong efforts in that direction already, far surpassing most of the filters out there, commercial and free, in terms of not triggering accidentally on legitimate mail. I am aware that the package is not perfect, and that it never will be, but I continue to strive for improvement, with features like automatic whitelisting which mean that regular correspondent's emails won't be tagged as SPAM if they send the occasional spammy-looking message; by improving the genetic algorithm that calculates the scores to be assigned to each rule; by refining the corpus to extend the amount of business-related email used in calculating the scores for the rules; by working constructively with legitimate bulk-mailers to tweak the rules in ways which allow their subscriptions to get through. The overall tone of your essay indicates I'm some kind of raving anti-spam bigot who's intent on enforcing his will on the world's email. That simply is not true, and such implications are somewhat defamatory. I'm a well respected and succesful capitalist and democrat (political process, not necessarily politcal party), with a strong background in both technology and marketing. I used to be the CTO of a succesful .com marketing company, and am currently working in market research. I would be much obliged if you would amend your web page to reflect more accurately my attitudes, beliefs, and work. If you do not do so, I will take it as a sign of malice, and will proceed accordingly. Also, if you would like to contact me in the future to double-check the accuracy of anything you'd like to publish, I'd be very happy to help you out, rather than having to reply after the fact. Yours, Craig Hughes _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
