Following up to myself, since I want to clarify something here... Another aspect that is relevant to me (but arguably not to most users of SA and I'm aware of that...) is that for me, english is not my native language, neither am I a resident of an english-speaking country. And because of this, my email is mixed; one part is dutch, one part is all the mailinglists I try to follow (which are in english). But not being a resident, the fact is that for all of my customers and myself, ANY mail mentioning mortgages, loans, ejaculation et al is a surefire sign of spam. If not it would have mentioned hypotheken, leningen and klaarkomen, which are the dutch translations. :-)
Now I don't expect SA to know dutch; that would be unfair. But what I would like is some way to score those english terms way higher than an american would or could. For an american, mortgage does not spell spam per se. But for ME it does, and I can practically guarantee I will not ever get an email that mentions "mortgage" together with "you have been approved" which won't be spam. Well, none of this is your concern of course. But I would really really really like if there was a way to have those typical english spam-words score way higher than they do now. Could we maybe envision two rulesets, one for english-speaking residents and one for non-english speaking residents...? I edited the score file myself but not only is it a hard, long and error-prone task, but by editing it I throw away much of the valueable knowhow which assembled that score-list in the first place. But I am faced with the fact that over 95% of my spam is in english and that I cannot sit back while the online pharmacies fly around me, so to speak. Put yourself in my (our, if i'd be speaking for all non-english countries) place and ask yourself this question: Would you accept a score of only 0.5 for a rule that says "gratis hypotheekadvies" or "vijf miljoen emailadressen" ?? No, of course you wouldn't, because you'd know that a company that pretends to sell you a mortgage from 12000 miles away will never ever be a genuine offer... In other words, a lot of us get bitten by the fact that "mortgage" in some countries, in some contexts can be non-spam but for the rest of us it is a surefire sign to be spam. And again that is not anyone's fault but we should try and make SA flexible enough to accomodate this fact by changing the scoring. I know you can teach SA to recognize spam in ones' own language, but what is missing right now is a simple way to make SA much more immune to the abundant english spam, which arguably is by FAR the bulk of all spam... Kind regards, Maarten On Friday 07 November 2003 22:21, maarten van den Berg wrote: > On Friday 07 November 2003 18:43, Matt Kettler wrote: > > At 10:29 AM 11/7/2003, Maarten J H van den Berg wrote: > > >Sorry if this has been discussed in the past... > > > > It's been discussed many times.. It's very common for people to have a > > very deep misunderstanding of how SA scoring works. Most people fall into > > the trap of over-simplifying the problem, and simply assuming that some > > rule or another "must" be a good spam rule, when in fact it's not. <snip> -- Yes of course I'm sure it's the red cable. I guarante[^%!/+)F#0c|'NO CARRIER ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: ApacheCon 2003, 16-19 November in Las Vegas. Learn firsthand the latest developments in Apache, PHP, Perl, XML, Java, MySQL, WebDAV, and more! http://www.apachecon.com/ _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
