I've recently had a couple of false positives caused by this rule, and think
it may be scored too highly for a single check. The e-mails in question were
in Spanish, and the Spanish word for linguistics has two accented characters
which is enough to trigger this rule.
Admittedly, the blacklists account for 2.4 points (it was from Yahoo) but the
4.3 point score for the subject alone strikes me as excessive. I understand
that anything that is not English is inherently suspect for most users, but
to give 86% of the default spam score on almost *any* single rule would seem
to me to be overkill.
Alternatively, is there (or should there be) a ruleset for those who wish to
receive e-mail in other languages? Ideally, a Spanish-friendly ruleset would
reduce the scores of character-based rules, while adding in rules for known
spam in Spanish where possible. Does such a thing already exist? Should it?
The spam report from the e-mail in question follows, although the above
pretty much sums it up.
X-Spam-Report:
* 0.0 DK_POLICY_SIGNSOME Domain Keys: policy says domain signs some mails
* 0.0 DK_POLICY_TESTING Domain Keys: policy says domain is testing DK
* 4.3 SUBJ_ILLEGAL_CHARS Subject: has too many raw illegal characters
* 0.0 DK_SIGNED Domain Keys: message has an unverified signature
* -0.0 DK_VERIFIED Domain Keys: signature passes verification
* 0.5 HTML_40_50 BODY: Message is 40% to 50% HTML
* 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
* 0.0 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60%
* [score: 0.5000]
* 0.2 DNS_FROM_RFC_ABUSE RBL: Envelope sender in abuse.rfc-ignorant.org
* 1.4 DNS_FROM_RFC_WHOIS RBL: Envelope sender in whois.rfc-ignorant.org
* 0.8 RCVD_IN_BLARS RBL: Received via a relay in block.blars.org
* [217.216.40.199 listed in block.blars.org]
[66.163.178.160 listed in block.blars.org]
* -0.5 AWL AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list
Regards,
Keith
