On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 23:00:14 -0800 "schafer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> To Spamassassin:
>
> 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. This is just as intolerable as
> spam. It is worse than spam because it victimizes the innocent in the name
> of stopping spam. (And it may even be a violation of the Americans With
> Disabilities Act which prohibits discrimination against the disabled) It is
> rank hypocricy.
> False positives are intolerable and commercial products that allow them
> should be outlawed as much as spam should be.
>
> 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. This arrogance stinks,
> too. As if software developers don't need public feedback about their junky
> products.
Take a deep breath and sit down.
There are several actions you can take to reduce the likelihood that
your mailings are flagged as spam.
First, download and install a copy of SpamAssassin (SA), turn off the
bayesian (statistical) classifier, run your mailing through SA, and see
what score it gets, look at what rules give the largest scores and edit
your message so it doesn't trip those rules. Scores greater than 5 are
considered spam; 5 is the default threshold but may be adjusted by the
end user.
>From the limited information you've provided, it appears that your mail
is being flagged primarily by containing excessive HTML ("excessive"
based on the analysis of hundreds of thousands of spam and non-spam
messages) - reduce the amount of HTML used in the newsletter (esp. all
the useless <font>, <big>, <small>, and tags), fix the
URL-encoding on hostnames in links (e.g.
<a href="http://www.SCERTS.com%E2%80%9D";>www.SCERTS.com</a>), set the
colors within a "safe" palette, get rid of unnecessary javascript (this
is a mail message, not a web page)
> 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%"
>
> Ha! What crap.
Bayesian classifiers are site-specific, having been trained by their
users as to which messages are spam and which are not. It might be that
much of the mail to that particular site or user from doitnow.com is
spam. Or that much of their spam resembles your newsletter. There's no
way for the SpamAssassin developers to know, short of looking at the
recipient's local database of mail statistics. If the user trained their
classifier with garbage, it will give lousy results though however they
trained it, your newsletter resembles other spam they receive. Note that
the autowhitelisting adjustment knocked 4.3 points off the score,
cancelling out the score from Bayes and then some.
Now you may bristle at the notion of some random person having the gall
to tell you how to format your newsletter. Your choice is either that,
or convince others to manually whitelist your mailings or not use
SpamAssassin. And remember, you came to us, we didn't come to you.
SpamAssassin appears to be operating correctly. Your message is
primarily flagged due to bad HTML formatting[1]; fix that and you should
have few problems. There's no indication that any of the autism-related
content is triggering any rules (it's possibly triggering Bayes but
there's no way to know from what you've provided and regardless, that
problem must be resolved on a per-site or per-user basis by the
recipient.)
Finally, the recipient determines whether a mail is a false positive or
not, not the sender. You don't set downstream mail acceptance policy. If
an end user is upset by SpamAssassin flagging their mail, then the end
user needs to adjust SpamAssassin locally, or contact the administrator
of the host that's tagging their inbound mail. If there's a bug in the
SpamAssassin code (which in this case there is not), a polite note to
the code's developers containing a short description of the bug and a
full sample message that triggers the bug is in order. Ranting in a
software support forum because some random third-party is filtering your
mail is unlikely to solve whatever problem you may be having and is a
wonderful way of convincing other people that wouldn't otherwise have an
opinion of you that you're a blithering ass.
If you want help with your problem, please act like a civil adult. If
you just want to rant, please don't waste our time.
-- Bob
[1] Like this choice fragment:
<small><span style="font-family:
corporaterounded-bold;"><small><small><small><small><small><small><small><small> </small></small></small></small></small></small></small></small><br
style="font-weight: bold;"></span></small>
which could probably be reduced to
<br>
Suggestion: Run your email through "HTML Tidy", available for free for
all common operating systems at http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
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