On Mon, 6 Aug 2012, Ben Johnson wrote:
Better still would be to remove this "feature" from SpamAssassin
altogether, as it is completely useless. That way, the problem would
disappear as soon as ASF updates to a version of SpamAssassin in which
the 12-letter-domain check is removed.
When we get enough masscheck corpora to generate an update, the scores
will go down to advisory. If sufficient masscheck corpora were available
for regular score updates this issue would have been resolved a month
ago.
The fact is that nobody has articulated the rationale behind the
12-letter-domain check speaks for itself.
Someone observed a noticeable amount of spam coming from twelve-letter
domain names, and the rule for such performs well against the current
masscheck corpora.
If a rule is deemed to be useless, why is it not removed?
The masscheck corpora size is hovering just below the threshold for
generating updates. There are various reasons for this.
http://www.chaosreigns.com/dnswl/tot.svg
It's possible that fixing this rule is important enough to spur releasing
a manual rules update. However, masscheck rule scores based on starved
corpora may actually be _worse_ overall than the effects from this one
rule. If we _do_ generate a manual rules update to fix just this rule, it
should really be a manual update to fix just this rule, for example by
manually altering 70_scores.cf in the update tarball to adjust just the
scores for this rule.
I will mention this on the dev list.
--
John Hardin KA7OHZ http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
jhar...@impsec.org FALaholic #11174 pgpk -a jhar...@impsec.org
key: 0xB8732E79 -- 2D8C 34F4 6411 F507 136C AF76 D822 E6E6 B873 2E79
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