I have an enlighten me question here.
...
As these addresses were specifically put out as bait and not legit addresses that are used for every day correspondence, how can you be so sure that legitimate email would ALSO not be caught up in the declude rankings - as no legitimate email is coming into these test?
Good question. :)
Legitimate mail definitely would be caught by the tests that we list in the spam stats. That's why good anti-spam software usually uses a weighting system of some sort (also referred to as ranking, scoring, etc.). For example, the SPAMHEADERS test will catch a fair amount of spam, but also will catch a fair amount of legitimate mail (typically from CEO-designed web mailers that don't follow the recommendations of RFCs) -- so it would get a low weight. The BADHEADERS test also catches a fair amount of spam, but will never catch legitimate mail (unless it is sent from broken mail client), so it would get a very high weight (but not high enough to block the E-mail if it just fails that test, so that mail from those rare broken mail clients can still get through). The DSBL test (which the mailserver you sent from is listed in) would get a weight in between the two, as it doesn't have as many false positives as the SPAMHEADERS test, but more than the BADHEADERS test.
We do plan to add false positive ratios to our spam stats, but those take much more work to compile, and aren't as accurate (as the variety of legitimate E-mail is much greater than the variety of spam, and the legitimate mail that we have access to doesn't include all types of legitimate mail).
-Scott
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