At 11:38 03-04-2008, egrossKintera wrote:
I'm having a similar problem with understanding SpamAssassin scores and
rules. I have searched and searched for specific explanations of them, but
have had very little luck. The links you provided are a start, but there is
no real explanation for people trying to code emails and eNewsletters. For
"The rules catch spam. If your email isn't spam, you shouldn't be
matching the rules. Even if you do hit an occasional rule, unless
your email actually is spam, it shouldn't score high enough to be a problem."
If you are looking for an explanation on how to bypass the rules, you
won't find them in the documentation. What you have on the web page
I mentioned is advice to avoid false positives. I'll sum it up as
don't worry and be honest.
instance, what exactly does:
0.8 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_12 BODY: HTML: images with 1000-1200 bytes of words
mean? That the images in the email are too large? That they have too much
text in them? That their alt tags are too long?
It means that there were images in the message and the body contained
between 1000 to 2000 bytes of words.
Another rule I found confusing was:
0.4 HTML_60_70 BODY: Message is 60% to 70% HTML
versus
0.9 HTML_40_50 BODY: Message is 40% to 50% HTML
That's the ratio of HTML in the message. As for the score for each
rule, the documentation explains how it is assigned. One rule, or
even the three above, won't get your message flagged as spam.
I cleaned up an email template for a client, so the code was more
streamlined and had less HTML (keeping the same amount of images), but
strangely this got a higher score.
The higher score is not important unless your message scores above
the default threshold for spam. What you are doing above affects the
message body only. There are rules for tests on the headers and
message origin.
Streamling the HTML won't help much if your message contains other
signs, such as images, usually seen in spam.
Regards,
-sm
