Hi Richard,
At 08:42 27-03-2008, Richard Hole wrote:
I am interested in spam filtering software that I could encourage
either my server or other servers to use. My server currently uses
SpamAssassin and I hope your software
could be easily modified to do what I suggest below. I want to
receive my emails reliably without having genuine emails being
blocked and never seen by me due to spam filters. Filters are good
provided I can view the filtered emails in case a genuine email is
filtered. I do NOT want the software to change the subject of a
possible spam email in case a genuine email is labeled "SPAM" in the
subject. This would make sorting mail difficult because I do not
know how to remove the "SPAM" tags in the subject line.
SpamAssassin does content filtering. You pass a message to it and it
runs a bunch of tests and assigns a score to the message. It's up to
you to decide what to do with the message.
SpamAssassin can add headers and rewrite the Subject line. If you
don't want the Subject line rewritten, don't use the rewrite_header
Subject setting.
It would be good if the email could be set up so that the likely
spam emails are directed into another folder on the web based email
instead of being completely blocked. That way
You can configure your filter to either reject messages above the
score threshold or with a spam status of "Yes", or redirect the
message to a different mailbox or folder. It's up to your filter
(procmail, milter, etc.) to do that.
I have also thought of a way that could help reduce spam and avoid
the problem of legitimate emails being blocked. It could be an idea
to share this idea with other servers or Internet service providers
associations around the world so this could be adopted. What could
be done is that software could be set up on the servers so that an
email will never be blocked if it has a certain code in the subject
of the email. A three letter lower case code would be good as it
would be easy to type. If an email does not have the code it could
still get through. However, it would run the risk of being blocked
by spam filters. The filters or spam blockers could be set up so
that all emails with the code are allowed through unless the email
user wants to blacklist a particular address.
When two people communicate via email they would not have to type
each others code every time they reply as the code should
automatically appear in the subject field of the new message. If two
people are communicating, each of their codes could appear in the
subject field of the email. For example:
"Re: Interest in your product. zkl fvr"
You can add a rule to test the Subject header for that "code" and
assign a negative score for the above. This only works with other
antispam software if they allow the user to customize the
configuration by adding such rules.
Regards,
-sm
