> To Spamassassin: Who is this 'SpamAsassin' you're writing to ?
> My publication is double-opted in by 15,000 families with children with > autism. We are routinely victimized by incompetent software like > spamassassin because of false positives. Whoa, steady on there... not a good start to your message. "incompetent" ? I don't think so. I'm not a developer of Spamassassin, just an "end user" and I think it's one of the best spam filters available when properly set up. Perfect ? Of course not. No filter is, but damn good all the same. > This is just as intolerable as > spam. It is worse than spam because it victimizes the innocent in the > name > of stopping spam. Unfortunately there are innocent victims in the war between spammers and spam filters. What do you expect us to do ? Give up on spam filtering altogether ? I don't know about anyone else, but my email would be *totally* unusable without a spam filter. > (And it may even be a violation of the Americans With > Disabilities Act which prohibits discrimination against the disabled) It > is > rank hypocricy. I don't want to sound rude here, but as a non-American, this kind of stance gets right up my nose - whenever there is something to complain about, some American's roll out the constitution or the first amendment or some other American legislation. WAKE UP - the world is more than just America. American laws don't apply outside America. A large percentage of SpamAssassin users don't live in America (just look at the email addresses of some of the people one this very list) and aren't governed by "your" laws. Even if you had a valid point, the rest of the world isn't obliged to toe the line to American laws.... I don't know the figures but I would wager that at least some of the SpamAssassin developers don't live in America either. </rant> > False positives are intolerable and commercial products that allow them > should be outlawed as much as spam should be. And car accidents should be outlawed as well. And sickness. While we're at it, lets outlaw poverty too. Oh wait, it's not going to happen is it ? Just like it's impossible to guarentee no false positives, especially if your message looks a lot like spam. And SpamAssassin isn't a commercial product either. It's open source software under both the GPL and the artistic (?) license... I suggest you go read up on those... > I do not know if this is the right place to complain as I could not find > an > email address that offers feedback to the company. Company ? What company ? Why must software be written by a company ? Once again, go read up on what Open Source is. > This arrogance stinks, > too. As if software developers don't need public feedback about their > junky > products. Uh, hello ? Whats this you're giving us now ? Public feedback by any chance ? Somehow you managed to find the mailing lists, but don't seem to understand their purpose. We can't help that... > This piece of junk software rates my publication 99%-100% likely to be > spam. > > "* 3.0 -- BODY: Bayesian classifier says spam probability is 99 to 100%" No, that is the Bayesian classifier, which is *one* part of the array of tests that SpamAssassin uses. And it is one test that is different for every installation - what it scores a message depends on what it has been "taught" in the past, whether by autolearning or manual training. My guess is that your message either looks a lot like spam, or this particular person's SpamAssassin installation has had its Bayesian database poorly trained. Also from the score of 3.0 I notice that they must be running 2.5x which is now out of date. It's no use complaining about software many months out of date, they need to update it and you may in fact find that your "newsletter" is no longer incorrectly flagged in later versions. Rule #1 about asking for help for a piece of software on a mailing list - tell us what version it is. > > Ha! What crap. The offending email is also parked at this website page: > > http://home.doitnow.com/~edit/index.htm > > Lenny Schafer > Schafer Autism Report > > Exhibit: > > ---- Start SpamAssassin results Again, you havn't told us what version of SpamAssassin this is, (it would have been in the message headers) and without the version number the below tests are pretty much meaningless. > 7.10 points, 5.5 required; > * -0.1 -- Message-Id indicates the message was sent from MS Exchange > * 0.9 -- BODY: No such thing as a free lunch (3) > * 0.5 -- BODY: No Fees > * 0.5 -- BODY: Possible porn - Hot, Nasty, Wild, Young > * 0.1 -- BODY: HTML link text says "click here" > * 0.1 -- BODY: HTML font color is red > * 0.2 -- BODY: FONT Size +2 and up or 3 and up > * 0.1 -- BODY: HTML font color not within safe 6x6x6 palette > * 1.5 -- BODY: Message is 20% to 30% HTML > * 0.1 -- BODY: HTML has "tbody" tag > * 0.2 -- BODY: JavaScript code > * 0.1 -- BODY: HTML font color is blue > * 3.0 -- BODY: Bayesian classifier says spam probability is 99 to 100% > [score: 0.9988] > * 0.2 -- BODY: HTML contains unsafe auto-executing code > * 2.9 -- BODY: HTML has very strong "shouting" markup > * 0.4 -- URI: Uses %-escapes inside a URL's hostname > * 0.7 -- URI: Includes a link to a likely spammer email address > * 0.0 -- Asks you to click below > * -4.3 -- AWL: Auto-whitelist adjustment > ---- End of SpamAssassin results I'm sorry, but your message just comes across as an out and out rant or flame, if you seriously expect anyone to want to try and help you work through the issues to find a solution, you're going to have to change your attitude a lot. SpamAssassin is not a commercial company which you have paid money to for support, it is the efforts of a large group of individuals, most of them working on their free time. Of all the open source software that I use, SpamAssassin has by far the best mailing list and most responsive developers, who are easily approachable about things, but I suspect even they would tend to ignore a vitriolic message like yours... Regards, Simon ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials. Become an expert in LINUX or just sharpen your skills. Sign up for IBM's Free Linux Tutorials. Learn everything from the bash shell to sys admin. Click now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1278&alloc_id=3371&op=click _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
