> 1.15. Does SpamAssassin filter email-borne viruses as well as spam? > > No. SpamAssassin is focussed on identifying spam, and not viruses. > The mechanism of scanning for viruses is different, and software > tailored for virus scanning is much much better at this task.
Well, I wouldn't expect SpamAssassin to be able to know a virus by looking at patterns inside executable files. But there's a certain subset of viruses - worms - that follow a fairly predictable pattern. For example, the recent Microsoft worm always says something like ``this is the latest version of security update, the "September 2003, Cumulative Patch" update which eliminates all known security vulnerabilities'' at the beginning (although it replaces words with synonyms at random). Another virus that sends a .scr file is always Content-type multipart/alternative, and the text/plain part always says "Myzli!". Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that SpamAssassin's pattern scoring strategy is targeted against? Or is the problem that every new worm would require new rules to be written, since their message body could say anything, while unsolicited commercial mail, in order to be profitable, has to use certain words like [the drug that increases bloodflow to male anatomy, which I can't name or else the mailing list rejects my message] and "money back guarantee"? ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
