And to state the obvious... Giving negative weights to combinations of "good" server configurations would benefit correspondence from legitimate mail servers that would otherwise get tagged as spam by false positives on content filters, e.g. a joke e-mail with "bad words" or a newsletter with URLs that contain unnecessary IP addresses or escaped characters.
Kami suggested multiple different combinations that could be termed good, which means that a legitimate mail server wouldn't need to be perfect in every way in order to be scored "good". My own suggestion is combine the client source and the mail server with some logic. For example, if a message comes to my mail server from a mail server at c-67-160-69-182.client.comcast.net it is very likely to be spam; however if the source is c-67-160-69-182.client.comcast.net and the mail server is sccrmhc13.comcast.net then it likely to be legitimate, even though both sources are likely to be listed in multiple ip4r databases*. * Why? An open proxy or whatever on a consumer broadband network is unlikely to be a valid smtp server, and the whole range is in many blacklists. However, a message that comes from that range through the smtp server at that ISP is likely to be normal consumer mail. Going a little further, a traveller on a laptop as a guest at some random ISP but using his smtp server at his own ISP is also going to look bad, but is not guaranteed spammy. If that "guest" IP is also in spamcop or some other fluid ip4r database, the balance of tests should push the message over the weight limit. Andrew 8) -----Original Message----- From: Kami Razvan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 2:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Positive attributes (was "Test suggestion & request for comments...") "group of managers and team leaders to suggest a list of "good words" which are often used in correspondence," Hi Keith: Actually I think what Bill was originally talking about and what I was trying to say was a way to actually credit "good" servers. Lets say.. - No blacklists - Valid REVDNS - Valid Helo - Valid looking email & other attributes that are purely server related. If all valid then one can assign a negative weight to. This would be to credit good servers. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. are always going to be problematic and I am not much concerned about them. My concern is if we can assign credit to good ones then our other filters can be a little more loosely defined. Regards, Kami --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
