SpamAssassin does consider things like all-caps headers suspicious, but it takes a lot more than just an all caps subject line and a couple instances of the word sex to get SA to tag an email. In fact, the word sex by itself isn't a rule for spamassassin at all, although some phrases regarding sex videos, and other obvious pornography subjects are in the rule set.
SpamAssassin tallies a score for a given email based on a large collection of rules each of which has it's own point value. The scores are evolved against real emails which are manualy split into spam and nonspam piles. Rules matching a lot of spam with few or no nonspam matches wind up getting high scores, and rules matching even moderate amounts of nonspam get low or negative scores. This causes lot of rules that at first glance would seem to be spam only wind up matching a lot of nonspam and wind up with very low scores. A recent case of this was a no_credit rule that was generic enough to match on "notice: your credit card will be billed when the order is shipped". The system evaluates how much of the nonspam test data the rule matches and inherently drives the score of those rules down. Bad or overly generic rules wind up causing relatively little collateral damage this way.
As you can see SA tries very hard to not be fooled by normal emails that contain potentially spammish phrases. If you do have some false positive cases that are tagged by SA 2.43 or 2.42, I'd be happy to analyze them and try to tweak the offending rules to not match on legitimate email. Just send me an email explaining you're about to send me a false pos spam, then forward them to me, or better yet, to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (my home email where I do SpamAssassin rule tweaking). If you can do it as an attached file in unix mbox format that's wonderful, otherwise I'll work with just a plain forwarded copy of the mail as best I can. I will try to take obvious precautions about not reposting sensitive personal information, but I am prone to human error so use your own discretion in deciding what to forward to me for evaluation.
My guess is you're more often being bounced by someone who has a handful of homebrewed procmail rules that reject any email containing the word sex at all, and other simple "obvious" rules that a lot of sysadmins that aren't thinking carefully wind up implementing. SpamAssassin isn't so foolish as to have such simple false-positive prone evaluation rules.
Heck, even most of the "dirty jokes" my friends forward me aren't tagged by SpamAssassin, but I do have one that is picking on telemarketing tactics and contains a large number of junk marketing quotes that does get tagged. I'm not exactly surprised that a 3 page email quoting all kinds of marketing mortgage refinance, credit repair, prize winning and other obvious borderline scam type marketing gets tagged. It would be hard to realize the difference, but the bayesian filter in future generations of SA might be smart enough if well trained.
At 02:47 AM 10/31/2002 +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi folks, I admin 28 or so Genealogy lists and message boards at Rootsweb.com,
recently, I've noticed a big increase in posts to the lists being "bounced" to
me as Admin, cause they are being rejected as S P A M..I don't want to even
talk about the bounces from my Essex County NY list...<g> The larger ISP's
don't seem to have a problem, but the little folks seem to be inventing
somw "wonderful" antiSPAM rules...:-( Last I heard, Genealogy was the 2nd or
3rd biggest internet activity, Genealogy presents email differently than most
other email...ALL CAPS in the subject is common, that is how Surnames are
entered, the word sex repeated for each person in a family group
sheet.etc...has there been any dialog about these things?
--
Regards, Fred Provoncha, Volunteer Rootsweb Admin
http://home.att.net/~unclefred
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyessex
http://www.gencircles.com/users/unc
lefred
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb
.com/~unclefred/main.htm
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