On Monday 22 September 2003 18:30 CET Philip Mak wrote: > > 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. [...] 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 [...]?
Yes, that's more or less the "problem". Our profession is fighting spam, not virii and worms. Of course are there cases where SpamAssassin would work lovely as an anti-virus filter but we don't want to get sucked into a fight on yet another front line. That's the main reason why SpamAssassin probably won't ever include anti-virus pattern. On the other hand are there quite some requests for virus pattern lately. So I suggest that somebody starts another project (WormAssassin :o) which develops anti-virus pattern as an "add-in" ruleset for SpamAssassin. Cheers, Malte ------------------------------------------------------- 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
