From: "Justin Mason" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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There is no way you can "survive" all SpamAssassin installs.
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I disagree -- I wouldn't say that by any means.
First you say no.
Perhaps there may be issues with sites where people have manually
customised their local rulesets and settings to be over-aggressive, but
most sites are not that aggressive (nor should they be).
Then you say yes. I love it when people self-contradict themselves
in one message. When it's so close to gether it's a treasure. {^_-}
The default SpamAssassin ruleset is designed to *NOT* trigger false
positives on legit, solicited bulk email.
It does. If nothing else an accidental feed to Bayes will do it to it.
The UGLY reality is probably that you must use plain text in the messages
if it is supposed to get through most of the filters. Also be very careful
that any URLs contained in the body are not on any BLs. (This should be a
slam-dunk in his case. But even slam-dunks are not sure things.)
If HTML is used it should match the text portion. Text portions that
admonish the user to get a real email browser are a sure fire trip to
the /dev/null bin. (If they aren't and I see them in my real mail they
very quickly earn a spam rule or even a procmailrc rule. I don't do
business with arrogant so-and-sos if I can help it.)
And if HTML is used for God's sake make it handicapped accessible. I
seem to have a problem with typical flash based ad banners triggering
vertigo attacks. Animation should be eliminated. (I know a batch of
people who have this problem far worse than I do. I recommend tools
to them such as junkbuster (now obsolete) and privoxy to help mitigate
the animated ads. As a nice side effect it eliminates almost all ads.)
And as I recommended vet the prospective messages through your own
SpamAssassin install. Spammer's do it. Why don't legitimate folks do it,
too? (That's the only explanation I have for spams I get that trigger
every BL in the book yet get other scores near two or three.)
The REAL problems for SA installs, of course, is "One person's ham is
another person's spam." If somebody has done something silly and trained
"breast" as spam it'll be very hard to get discussions of breast cancer
through SpamAssassin.
This brings up a killer of a suggestion. As part of the sign-up sequence
suggest to the user that he or she contact the email administrator if
your emails are tagged as spam and request an appropriate special case
modification. This is fairly easy with SpamAssassin. It's not so easy
with some other tools, I suspect.
I'd also suggest being proactive with Robert and feeding him precanned
and carefully configured white list entries. If you develop a relatively
secure handshake with Robert it should work out nicely for those setups
that use the SARE Whitelist configuration file.
{^_^}
