Subject: Careful with those spamtools.....

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 17:17:40 -0700

I followed some links today, and discovered to my horror that one of the 
spamtools I'd been using had been throwing away some valid messages - 
including some from this very list.

It turned out that OSIRUSOFT had gone belly-up, and started declaring that 
"the world consists of spammers"..... or something.

Digging into the facts gave me the following link:

<http://news.spamassassin.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article
&sid=44&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0>

and the short fix is this (for people who know how to manipulate 
SpamAssassin scores):

score   RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM   0
score   X_OSIRU_DUL             0
score   X_OSIRU_DUL_FH          0
score   X_OSIRU_OPEN_RELAY      0
score   X_OSIRU_SPAM_SRC        0
score   X_OSIRU_SPAMWARE_SITE   0

Shows the risks of depending on too many services you don't track the 
status of.....

                 Harald

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From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 19:14:14 -0400 (EDT)

Indeed.  These open relay blacklist sites were always a highly
questionable source for mail filtering.  Quite obviously, open relays have
no relationship to spam, so using an open relay blacklist is going to
block a lot of non-spam email.  This wasn't the only way they duped and
misled their victims.  Frequently they told people to configure spam
filters so that relay use (open or closed) would fool their filters. So
their users got _more_ spam, not less.

		--Dean