Subject: RE: IETF announce list and spam filtering

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 00:22:05 -0700

At 12:08 AM 8/15/2002 -0700, Dan Kohn wrote:
>In defense of admins setting up SpamAssassin across a site, all
>SpamAssassin does is add a bunch of headers to the mail.  It's then up
>to the users to decide what threshold to filter on, if at all.

The nature of doing heuristic rulesets on naturally occurring text makes it 
extremely difficult to do a good job.  My own view is that spamassassin is 
remarkably effective.

At any rate, getting rulesets right is simply not a reasonable task for 
admins.  Rule-writing is not admin.  Very different skillsets.

The only criticism of the code is that it understands a restricted set of 
of RFC822 address format.  It ain't the first to do that.  Many user agents 
do, too.

d/

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Dave Crocker <mailto:[email-masked]>
TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 08:46:54 -0400

> SpamAssassin does is add a bunch of headers to the mail. 

I don't have a huge problem with the headers, but some sites actually do 
filter based on SpamAssissin's yes/no conclusion.