http://www.declude.com/plea.htm
A plea to developers of anti-spam software: ... over the past year or so, anti-spam companies have been popping up all over the place, often with plenty of money for marketing, but a poor product (often hyping that it "catches 99% of spam", without saying how much legitimate E-mail gets caught). They will often block E-mail that fails a single spam test. By itself, this causes some problems, but they can be fixed. However, as spam tests get more aggressive, there are now spam tests that block a lot of legitimate E-mail - but won't let the legitimate mailer get removed from that test without paying a lot of money (often hundreds or thousands of dollars), even though they did nothing wrong. HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM: For years, the best anti-spam programs have combined the results of many different spam tests. If you are going to run all the spam tests anyways, why not combine the results? For example, many legitimate E-mails are sent from Microsoft, and many of them have no reverse DNS entry (which is another important spam test - all mailservers should have a reverse DNS entry). However, they aren't using a DSL/cable connection, and they aren't listed in spam databases. They do fail another spam test, due to some unusual spam-like headers. By calculating a total score for the E-mail, it might end up with a total "weight" of 7 based on the two tests it failed. Since over 99% of spam has a weight of 10 or higher, the E-mail is then accepted. Weighting systems aren't foolproof. However, they are guaranteed to block less legitimate E-mail than any single spam test, and in practice catch more spam than most first generation anti-spam programs (the ones most new anti-spam vendors are selling), and catch much less legitimate E-mail. Of course, SpamAssassin is such a system and takes just such a weighted approach. ;) --j. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now. Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET. http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100003ave/direct;at.aspnet_072303_01/01 _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
