On Wednesday 21 August 2002 09:13 pm, Ben Reser wrote: > On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 07:15:51PM -0500, Igor Izyumin wrote: > > Besides, what happens if the spam filter catches a non-spam email? You > > can never trust those systems, because they are pretty stupid. Only > > sufficiently advanced users should be using them, and only when they know > > the consequences. The best solution to the spam problem is to not stick > > your email into every form out there (or to have a "junk" email addy on > > hotmail or something). Trying to filter spam with stupid keyword-based > > tools (spamassassin) is dangerous, and making it a default is insane. > > spamassassin isn't keyword based it's score based. Putting "penis > enlargement" in this email isn't going to cause everyone's spam assassin > to score my email as spam. And spam assassin just tags email as > suspected spam what you do with it is completely up to you...
Well, yes, but it does rely on keywords and headers to score the email. Sometimes, even a wrong header combination will cause it to trigger. It doesn't know the context of the email message (you'd need AI for that), yet it scores email based solely on its content (unlike razor-type tools which compare a message against a database). My point wasn't that it sucks, just that it is far from foolproof, does have false positives, and doesn't have a "reasonable" default configuration. If it is incorporated into Mandrake as an easily enabled option, you would probably have to provide a configuration drake for it. -- -- Igor
