Slashdot Mirror
Spam Catchers Block Latest Crypto-Gram
An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier sent out a note about SpamAssassin and possibly other spam filters blocking his excellent Crypto-Gram newsletter. Fortunately you can get it here (early no less!)." Schneier's email reads, in part "Tomorrow I will be sending out the February CRYPTO-GRAM, as I do on the 15th of every month. In the process of creating this month's Crypto-Gram, I discovered that SpamAssassin thinks that this issue is spam, probably because of certain links and descriptions of scams in the text. I have anecdotal evidence that other spam filters block Crypto-Gram as well. ... I'd apologize for the inconvenience, but I'm not sure what I could do to make it less so -- I don't intend to alter my content to accommodate spam filters."
block that important e-mail I was waiting for on enlarging my....never mind, I have to check my e-mail now.
And use the bayesian method to not block messages that fit this type as spam.
but why not distro the newsletter encrypted? then the spam filters wouldnt have anything to trigger the filters, and id say the target audience have the knowledge to unencrypt it when it gets there..
So he sends out the Crypto-Gram newsletter, then he sends out a note about the Crypto-Gram newsletter. 2 emails to cover what should've been sent as 1. Seems like the spam filter is doing just fine ...
Why ?
__________________________________
Free your mind - Flush your toilet
That's easy to fix, add the crytogram address to a whitelist. Every spam
filtering software I've ever run, including spamassasin (which I like a great
deal) has a whitelist option. If you're running some kind of filtering
software, it behooves you to keep an eye on what it's blocking, hence, I am
sure that people are aware of it and have adjusted their software accordingly.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
That's why most good spam blockers (especially OS X's Mail.app) use their filters but compare the senders to a whitelist so that your friends can send you whatever they want to. If you've been receiving CRYPTO-GRAM for a while, it should be on your whitelist, and the blocker should just let it by.
But you don't always want to get everything people send you (everybody has those people who send you things they think are funny but you just can't stand). So there should be levels of "friendship" in the whitelist, so that some senders can be considered dubious (their mail shouldn't be deleted like spam, but perhaps placed in a different "Uninteresting" folder).
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
You could always sign up for Habeas SWE and put their little haiku "warrant" in your headers. This will stop most spam tools from filtering you out, unless of course you violate the terms and send UCE including the warrant.
BalamSpamAssassinAssassin could look at the folder where you put your filtered mail and learn what to pull back out, and flush the rest to /dev/null.
I'm sure Paul Graham will be glad to write it in lisp.
Or, of course, we could just do what the obvious solution is: get in a P.O. Box, send out spam for herbal viagra and penis enlargement, and when you get the checks in the mail HUNT THE CUSTOMERS DOWN AND KILL THEM.
It's simple, really.
Get with the times! Regular filters with whitelisting are old news. New filters are smarter than that.
False-Positives should be a non-issue. Either you choose to run a spam filtering software and live with thoose limitations or don't run a spam filtering program and deal with the extra emails about enlarging various organs that you will receieve every day.
I do tech support for a webhosting company and people call us every day complaining about their spam but as soon as we offer blocking software based on lists, etc all we get is complaints that some more-valuable-than-gold email is going to get lost and ruin their entire business.
This is a simple choice and people have to learn they can't have their cake and eat it too.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
obPlug: This is why I created Trustic.
This is exactly the problem with most content filtering approaches.
It is very hard to discern the difference between talk about sex, spam, viruses, etc and talk from sex, spam, viruses, etc. Newsletter authors go as far as writing "v*rus" and "sl*mmer" so that pitiful content filtering blocks don't trash them.
It gets even worse for email lists that use inline text ads. The ads alone would constitute spam, but they're nestled within several paragraphs of high-quality discussion.
The problem is that content filtering approaches usually only analyze the "spamminess" of a piece. They usually don't analyze the "goodness" of a piece. So if I put "hot teens go crazy for debt-free viagra while earning $$$ from home" in the middle of some fine Shakespeare, that will get flagged as spam.
The new "bayesian" approaches are finally dealing with this problem -- something can look an awful lot like spam, but it will be saved if it looks even more like legitimate email.
In this case, spam doesn't generally run for 21 pages with words like "cryptography," and "full disclosure."
It all goes downhill from first post
No, there's no reason to change the newsletter. (And certainly CRYPTO-GRAM isn't the only e-mail newsletter that's run into problems with spam filtering.)
IMHO, spam filters are always going to be an evolving act--more obviously so with pseudo- and full Bayesian methods.
So let's treat this as part of the corpus of "non-spam" or "ham" or whatever you'd like to call it and code accordingly. If this brings more focus to improving filters and addressing non-technical methods (i.e. legal action, petitions, legislative advocacy), great.
But do we need another discussion of spam filtering?
-Geoff
(In my case, I simply filter off known good messages first before sending it to the Junk Mail filtering.)
Who thinks this is an utter waste of a FPP? I mean, why the hell would anybody even submit this to /.? And if they did, why the hell would it be posted fer crissake?
Wow. Some spam filters may have a false positive. How groundbreaking. News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
ehintz
At least he is only on Spamassassin which tends to be run on the client-side, so statistically less people would not see the newsletter. If he were on the SPEWS's blocklist, he'd never get out!
http://www.antispews.org/ the SPEWS fansite (not!)
Personally I see less problem with client-side blocking, as there is less chance that any 2 people would use exactly the same combination of blocklisting/priorities/etc. Plus, programs like Spamassassin use quite a lot of processing power, so large mail servers (eg. for an ISP) would need significant additional resources to handle this. Thus it is best to move such individualized and resource-intensive applications to the client-side anyway.
YMMV.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
Sure. Assuming Schneier has the public keys of all his subscribers, AND the processing power to encrypt everything in a reasonable span of time. That second is a big if, considering the number of subscribers. It would be possible to use a symmetric algorithm and include the key in the message, but while most readers would have the knowledge to decrypt it, they would likely not have the software to do so easily, and so it would be much more convenient for them to just get the announcement and go check the website, as opposed to spending half and hour trying to find and configure software.
Thanks, but I already knew that (the hard way). Must be something to do with enlarged things....
C|N>K
Spamassassin also marks the slashdot ( text only ) and freshmeat ( html ) newsletters as SPAM.
Spam Assassin does not block spam. It just marks it as spam so you can do your own sorting/filtering with your email client. Anyone doing this should periodically review their "spam bucket" where they route such spam-marked articles.
Unfortunately, I have executed a virus and now get quite a few emails trying to get me to run the program again because it uses search techniques to tell who my friends are and sends me a message from one of them with a wrong IP address. Fortunately, this virus wasn't written by a spamme (to my knowledge).
Unfortunately, informing individuals that their system has been compromised can be a very time consuming process. Does anyone have any suggestions.
void
if the spam blockers will come as standard on ISP-level, how much time spam will need to adapt? I fear time, when my email box will be flooded with hundreds letters, each mimicking [slashdot] stories :)
according to saint thomas, in this universe every essentia needs its ente. even spam.
I don't intend to alter my content to accommodate spam filters.
Some of us aren't so lucky. The rest of us actually need eyeballs on our newsletters and try to test our content through filters before sending it out. I am consistantly amazed at the little things that flag my newsletter as spam.
When you run SpamAssassin in test mode, it tells you what rules got hit. You can also look at the headers in "Spam-Tagged" email to see what rules got hit. I looked for "Spam Testing" pages on the 'net, but had no luck.
Could someone run the Crypto newsletter through SA to find out what cased its evaluation?
As an aside, Counterpane could have done this to find out what the problem was, too. Not that they should have to, but they could have.
It all goes downhill from first post
I have
Const maxspamsize = 42695
in my spam filter - I've only receive one piece of spam larger than than in the last 12 months (a giant promotion for a Korean trade show). It speeds up my spam filter processing and lets large newsletters (with false triggers like this) through without a problem.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
President Bush was walking today and bent over and tied his shoe in a double knot... who cares
I realize its tradition and there's a certain extra bit of personal ownership involved in having a copy of the contents arrive entirely in my mailbox, but... Why do newsletters waste the bandwidth of sending out copies of the content to everyone on the list? A small email with a single link to the contents of the new newsletter would work just as well and only those people that read it would spend the bandwidth. In addition, the author could then scrutinize the logs and see what links and what sections generated interest and perhaps better serve the (sometimes not fully understood) audience.
nigger
its funny laugh
The Risks digest reported in 1991 that the email newsletter from the International Association for Cryptographic Research was being blocked by spam filters. One of the IACR board members was a crypto expert with the unfortunate name of Don Beaver. And there were some references to "hardcore bits" and LaTex. It was all too much for the filters.
Well, it gets through our spam filter just fine. It got a weight of 33% spam which is way below our threshold. I guess spam assassin and other such thingy-whuzzits need to relax a little. Nobody has sent this cryptogram off to razor, have they? That would cause a headache!
--g33k
At the bottom of his article is mentioned a blurb about a company that manufactures software that uses 1 million bit encryption. Yup, it's snake oil, but the problem is that they're making money,
They build an alternate reality where every cryptographic algorithm has been broken, and the only thing left is their own system. "The weakening of public crypto systems commenced in 1997. First it was the 40-bit key, a few months later the 48-bit key, followed by the 56-bit key, and later the 512 bit has been broken..." What are they talking about? Would you trust a cryptographer who didn't know the difference between symmetric and public-key cryptography? "Our technology... is the only unbreakable encryption commercially available." The company's founder quoted in a news article: "All other encryption methods have been compromised in the last five to six years." Maybe in their alternate reality, but not in the one we live in.
They've got pseudo-scientific gobbledygook galore, including paragraphs like this: "Stated simply, the content of the message is not sent with the encrypted data. Rather, the encrypted data consists of pointers to locations within a virtual matrix, a large (infinitely large in concept), continuously changing array of values." I just love stuff like this. It almost just barely makes sense. It's as if someone took a cryptography book, had it machine-translated from language to language to language, and then tried to write similar-sounding text. Some of the words and phrases are scientific, but the paragraph makes no sense.
THE WORST PART IS THE FOLLOWING:
According to a press release on their Web site, the U.S. Department of Labor recently gave them $4M. Various smaller companies are supposedly using this stuff. SC Magazine gave them a five-star rating, for goodness' sake! I am amazed at the sheer stubbornness that can be exhibited by a company that simply refuses to accept reality.
void
So blocking untrusted servers doesn't make email unreliable? I find that very hard to believe. Considering that most of the time it is Net blocks that are blocked, not just individual IP addresses.
blocking IP addresses is also open to abuse... If I had a grudge against an ISP, I could fake some SPAM headers and send it to any of the IP blockers. Maybe send several copies from different accounts. Getting an IP listed is usually easier than getting it removed, so in the mean time many legitimate emails are being blocked...
I believe you have to attack the root of the problem, and that is stopping the SPAM at the origin. This is probably the more difficult approach, but it is the only one that will avoid dropping legitimate mail.
With the readership of the crypto-gram, why isn't it just in the "known mailing list" list?
I'm sure it would save a lot of trouble to everyone.
Of course, if they use Netscape, ROT13 is a right-click away.
Do you remember where that quote is from?
It reminds me of another good one:
Arrogance is compensation for a lack of intelligence.
that I think was the same person, but I can't seem
to find either of those quotes.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Spam filters are the wrong way to go, because of the false positive problem. A better way is to charge the sender a penny for every email they send.
The first inclination one has would be to suggest that everyone close their open relays. But this depends on people doing the right thing all the time, and has proven ineffective.
Fortunately, there's another way.
Right now, everyone who receives mail has to listen to everyone who tries to connect. The problem is how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
The solution is to take advantage of the information SMTP and TCP/IP give you when a connection is established. The fact that you're receiving a connection gives you the address of the sender. And during an SMTP transaction, one of the SMTP commands (the MAIL FROM command) gives you the domain of the email's sender, e.g. "MAIL FROM slashdot@sysexperts.com".
When you're sending email to someone else, you do so by looking up the MX records for their domain, which tells you which systems are responsible for receiving email for that domain. This gives us a possible answer to the spam problem.
Suppose instead of blindly accepting email from everyone, you were to take the domain given to you by the MAIL FROM command, look up the MXes for that domain, and reject the email connection if the IP address of the sender doesn't match one of the domain's MXes?
Now, suddenly, you would end up rejecting email sent from every unauthorized relay, because the owner of the domain can make any system that is allowed to send email on behalf of his domain into an MX (and, if he doesn't want that system to be used for delivering email, then he simply makes such systems the lowest priority MXes in the list and blocks outside port 25 connections to them ... something he's probably doing anyway).
Suddenly, the only systems that spammers can send email from are systems that they legitimately control and that are defined as MXes for a domain they control. Suddenly, spammers have to set up and maintain their own domains and their own boxes. The costs have just become a lot higher, which will get rid of most of the spammers.
And suddenly, blocking spam becomes orders of magnitude easier -- you only have to deal with spammers who have decided to pay the (now much higher) price for sending spam and who cannot use someone else's system to do their dirty work without permission.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I use procmail with SpamAssassin in this manner:
It only takes a little bit of thought and minimal configuration to keep your mail from incorrectly being flagged as SPAM. For me, using this method has led to zero (0) false positives on messages from known sources, for two years. Every once in a while a SPAM message sneaks into my INBOX (a couple a year), but then I submit it to a SPAM database used in SA's checks (like Razor), or adjust any particularly annoying rules' scores, and it doesn't make a repeat appearance for me.
If your find that any particular newsletter is being treated as SPAM by your mail filters, there's probably a very simple way for you to make sure it isn't filtered out. Use the tools you have wisely, and you won't be disappointed.
~Chris
I also run the spam filters for my employer. I use spamassassin and mailsweeper with a ton of custom rules. It is my responsibility to be the human interface that examines the caught spam spool every day and delete or forward the emails. If people subscribe to a mailing list that has advertising link or other spam triggers I let tell them they need to mail the list admin and tell them to stop. Otherwise it sucks to be them. I have no tolerance anymore. Do not let your mail have the characteristics of spam if you want it to reach people. wtf.
ROT-13? Not so fast!
here
Maybe YOU want to risk the jail time, but me, I'll pass!
I'm using SpamNet and while I never subscribed to the letter, it's interesting to note that *if* SpamNet users are not receiving it, it is only because a significant number of people who are receiving it don't want it.
I highly recommend you read up on this. Even if you don't go for the gory statistical details, read Paul Graham's overview:
... was easily caught and filtered, even though every keyword is mispelled or mangled, and even though the body of the message was seemingly spam-innocent.
http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html
It works quite well, even when spammers try to evade it using techniques like you mentioned. For example, a message with this:
Highten S/e/x/u/a/l Satisfation, 1 0 0 % Safe
Oh I should also mention I'm using this filtering in Mozilla 1.3 beta. They are implementing the algorithm described in that link.
As a lot of people will probably whitelist cryptogram, if one wishes to spam technical people, he just needs to set From to Bruce.
An employer of mine sent out a very important e-mail with "IMPORTANT - MUST READ" in the title, and guess how many people got it? All thanks to wonderful e-mail filters...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Free speech isn't about simply being able to speak something. It's about being able to speak about any topic you choose to. If you want to speak about voting out the incumbent president, or recommending penis enlargers, that should be your right. Infringements on free speech are those that take into account what the speech subject is, to decide whether to suppress it or not. This is the kind of infringement that content filtering does. Perhaps the content filtering is simplistic and looks for "penis" in the message. Or perhaps it is very sophisticated and approaches a conceptual understanding of the message. But regardless of how good it is, by being based on the content, this is infringing against free speech.
Of course for your own mail server, whatever you choose to use is up to you. The US First Amendment only applies to restrictions imposed by the government. But I happen to choose to not restrict based on content; I choose to restrict based on the behaviour of the sender who is sending unsolicited bulk email (UBE) regardless of the content.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Am I the only one that has all of the mailing lists I subscribe to bypass SpamAssassin?
For each mailing list I subscribe to, I use a special address suffix just for that list, that bypasses all of my spam checks (including SpamAssassin ), and just goes right into the mailbox that I use for that mailing list.
No problems with false positives, and it saves me the overhead or running SpamAssassin on every incoming message from a busy list.
it just seems like common sense, no one should have a problem with SpamAssassin misclassifying incoming newsletters if they just think about how they organize their email.
Aside from the spot-on comments that people have made regarding adding a whitelist entry Crypto-Gram (an obvious candidate for whitelisting if there ever was one, given that it frequently discusses spam, scams, and probably even includes text straight out of some spams), here is my initial analysis and response to him.
Oh, first one other comment: SpamAssassin does not block content. SpamAssassin only flags probable spam. What the site or user does with that flag is their own business. Some mail administrators misuse SpamAssassin to block email, but we do not recommend blocking email. Really.
------
[...] One false positive (or a related set of false positives) is not really a statistically useful sample size. To get to a high rate of filtering, most filters do have some false positives. You can get fewer false positives with customization of one form or another (personalized Bayes training, whitelists, rules, automatic learning algorithms). Our goal (everyone's goal, I think) is to get the best ratio of false positives to false negatives. It's a difficult balance sometimes and some legitimate content has a harder time.
On to the data:
I checked your newsletter with two versions of SpamAssassin: the current stable version (2.44) and the very-soon-to-be-released development version (2.50).
A score of 5.0 is the default threshold to be flagged as spam.
In SA 2.44, your mail receives a score of 3.20 (2.40 as I received it, but I believe the score would be about 3.20 for most people). That's on the high side, but has bit to go before being flagged as spam. The score is the same with network tests (DNS blacklist tests and Razor).
In SA 2.50, your message would probably receive a score of 1.90 without network tests and 1.00 with network tests. Note that the test scores may change a bit before the final release of 2.50, but those are better scores, more what we like to see for non-spam content. They would be even lower when using Bayes (part of SA 2.50). Those lower scores are not unexpected because... well, 2.50 is better. :-)
Based on these results, it's not clear to me why yesterday's newsletter was flagged as spam. Some possibilities:
Can you give me more information about the false positive that you experienced or was reported to you?
Thanks.
Dan
------
If I find out more of interest before the thread is closed to comments, I'll try to post a follow-up to my post.
This simply shows that newsletters and similar are not really sent by the right medium right now. EMail hasn't kept up with the times and as a result we see this endless amount of spam.
;)
What is needed is a foolproof way of saying "I want this, please send it to me" and then being able to reject it safly without needing the other party to do it for you. For example:
I send a message to cryto-gram, including a key. This key can then be used to send it to me, and I accept it (key in combination with who send it and so on, I am sure someone with even more experience can figure out a fool proof way). Good stuff. But then I realise that I don't want this anymore, and I simply remove the acceptance of this key in my own software (and send a message that I don't want it anymore, no harm being nice to the nice), and it will be filtered away.
Or something along those lines, I can asure you that I haven't fixed up a foolproof and perfect system yet
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This employer, he didn't happen to have a funky, some might say pointy, hair cut, did he?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
..."Ancient Gurus srb and guenther say, 'Sort your mailing lists to the folders before you filter your spam.'"
Crypto-Gram isn't the only mailing list that gets hit by misunderstandings - all automatic mail handling is always confused about automailers and mailing lists. And even due to usability factors, it makes sense to sort mailing lists to folders anyway, and use a client that supports multiple specific folders.
Yes, i was using this shared network spam killer, which was great apart from the fact that it shared headers with other no nothings who subsrcibe to newsletters, then log them as spam. It also had problems whenever it updated itself - very annoying, anyway, it got itself removed from my system - also not an easy task, and I have the very neat and fun "Popfile" spam killer / email sorter - just what i always wanted!
I've found my own answer, spammers rarely put my e-mail in the To:/CC: fields, so I have set procmail to deliver all my mail to the 'unknown' folder by default and have a rule which puts e-mail sent to all my known addresses put in my inbox folder, and mailing lists go to their own folders. I also allow mail delivered to anything @mydomain to deliver to my mailbox via procmail, and use a different address for each site/vendor/whatever and therefore I can block bad e-mail addresses forever
My primary mailbox is with a small, local ISP. I can't buy broadband from them, so I get my connectivity via cablemodem. I do have a mailbox in the cablemodem company domain -- that's the one I give out when I expect abuse. (I do it this way because I expect to be dealing with that ISP long after the cable vendor has either ceased to exist or has treated me badly enough that I left.)
So I want my outbound mail to appear to have come from the ISP. Setting Reply-To is usually adequate, but not always -- when a human is looking for the address, they could easily grab the wrong one. And it creates potential confusion I don't want to create. So I set my from address to name@isp.com.
I can't relay through the ISP's relays, because I'm outside of their IP range. (If they did some form of authenticated SMTP, such as SMTP-after-POP, they could let me.) And the cable vendor's mail relays won't send mail out with some other domain name on it. So I send everything out directly, no relays.
If you look at many headers, I suspect you'll find that I'm not the only one forging my From: address for legit reasons. The presence of the X-Authentication-Warning header some MTAs add correlates fairly weakly with spam. (Some details of it -- e.g. no valid reverse DNS for the sending machine's IP -- could be useful indicators.)
... SpamAssassin actually _lowers_ the spam rating of a particular mail if it's got a GPG signature on it.
make a list of validated e-mail addresses and move them to the inbox before you run the spam-filter.
Privacy is terrorism.
But most of the time does not really matter, what matters is the DNSbls upon which your handling is based. After a brief foray into listing /24s, SpamCop has returned to its original practice of listing only the offending IP addresses.
If I had a grudge against an ISP, I could fake some SPAM headers and send it to any of the IP blockers.
And you could get your right to submit spam revoked when the ISP complained.
I doubt any content filter will ROT13 any message just to see what is in it. A line not ROT13 will be enought to the ones that don't get it when first looking at it.
.sig
--
I have no
..to me, what's the use? to avoid missing the emails that were false positives, you have to go through the rejected mails, so you see the spam anyway, may as well have it in my inbox, saves me switching folders. or am i missing something here?
I have a domain at a dedicated hosting company (i.e. not an ISP), which I want to use as my primary address. At the moment the host has a mail relay (using POP-before-SMTP to prevent abuse), so while at home, I ignore my ISP's mail services completely and use my web host's POP3 and relaying; when my domain was with a different host a while ago, I couldn't even do that, since they provided POP but not SMTP, so I had to use a "forged" header as you describe.
At university this is even more necessary, since my university blocks port 25 at most of their routers - the only exception is that anyone in the university can connect to a "server" (actually a load-balancing cluster) which acts as a central relay. This means it's impossible to send mail unless it's either tunnelled in some way (not an option for me, my web host charges extra for ssh), or through this relay server. The relay accepts mail with any faked From address, on the basis that some people (including some departments) need this functionality, and if someone spams through it, they have it logged and know who to blame.
(Before you ask whether my uni gives me an e-mail address: yes it does, but I do game modifications, and I don't want to use my uni address for that. Also, my domain is more permanent than an address that disappears when I graduate)
I don't intend to alter my content to accommodate spam filters
But spammers will.
I really liked spamassasin but after using POPFile, I don't think I will ever go back. http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
1 3876
BTW the "magnets" feature seems just what you want. Give it a look, the saftware is free as in beer and speech and runs on perl (for *NIX like systems/servers) or you could use the binary distro for Win32 if that is more to your liking. And finally if you love it you can "feed" the author. http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=2
pingmeep
Who cares....if you want to avoid looking like spam do it. If you don't I won't see it! Big frecking deal....
Actually I invented my sig 3 years ago in my freshman English class. I was trying to comprehend the idiocy of my classmates, and the phrase just wrote itself down on paper.
;) ), but I would certainly subscribe to it.
I do not know who invented the quote you mentioned (but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the same person... ie "not me"
And by the way: if anyone can find a classical source that actually invented my sig, I would be interested in knowing it. As far as I know, I invented it, but if someone else came up with it first, I plagiarised it completely unknowingly. If I didn't really come up with it, I would like to give credit where credit is due.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
So I just code all incoming files with embedded HTML as spam.
It was reported just a few days ago that MSN emails now have ONLY an HTML mime part -- no more plaintext. Just like spam. Sure, it's fun to say things like "well, I don't, and wouldn't, have any friends on MSN", but that's just being juvenile, isn't it?
One simple rule for its versus it's
Headers added by spamassassin:
It still sounds like I should upgrade to 2.5 when it comes out, sounds like some very nice features. Keep up the good work.
Note that SpamAssassin isn't on my whitelist or anything like that -- it just worked.
False alarm?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I just got the email today and it failed. I'm running 2.44 from Debian and haven't yet looked at tweaking any of the rules.
Here's the verbose banner that SA put on my copy:
It looks like some dumbass has entered it into Razor. Unfortunately, some people (and yes I did this originally) had their procmail setup to enter an email into razor if it is deemed "spam" by SA or something else. Those 3.9 points are what puts it over the threshold.
that's called signing, not encrypting, you dolt.
I know that if I get e-mail from Half.com or Ebay.com or a few others, there is a thing that shows up in the scores that says something about it being a registered sender and therefore gets through.
also, if you are subscribed to a mailing list and don't have it on your whitelist... well, then dhuuuuuuur
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Just start using the headers from habeas.com, and you should not have these problems. I know spam assasin has a rule for this, as should the rest of the spam apps.
It seems to me that this is why a self adapting filter, such as spamprobe (free *nix filter that uses Bayesian analysis) is superior in the long run. It builds a database and associates words and multi word phrases with spam or non-spam. At the start, its guesses are rather crude but I found that after 'training' the filter with about 50 emails, the accuracy is incredible.
It has some other advantages too:
I learned this from the electronic greeting industry. Similar to Usenet 2 and Internet Mail 2000, messages semaphores will become the future of e-mail. People will create web content as easy as they create e-mail messages now and semaphore the recipients (using IM or email) to look at their content. Recipients who are interested will click on the URL in the semaphore. Recipients who want mail from Bruce, will open it. Bruce might even (G)PG(P)-sign the announcement notice so that spammers can't pretend to be him.
Then again, why should Bruce have to mail anyone at all? If his newsletter is so good, his readers will bookmark his page and read it every now and then, just like I do with DaemonNews or ArsTechnica.
The Internet is evolving, and Bruce is whining along the way. Mass-mailed newsletters are going the way of the dino-WAIS-server (just like FTP
-ez
That is a great idea until you realize that maybe I am reading my e-mail on my cell phone, or PDA, or a blackberry, or my friend's machine using hotmail or anything else other than a PC running Windows or Unix where I can install software at a whim.
For most
The rest of us spend very little time at a desktop.
Could you imagine this justification in any other context?
* Your car won't start because you bought gas from Amoco, who also sold gas to a traveling salesman
* You cell phone won't work because Verizon also sold a cell phone to a telemarketer
* The Postal Service refuses to deliver your mail because another postal customer was doing direct mail
* Your power goes out because the power company had a customer who sent out spam
This justification for shutting down mail servers is one of the most perverted things I have heard in a long time.
I, for one, would love to see a feature like this in a mail program! Actually, I'd like to participate in the development of an existing open source email app if someone could recommend one. Java based would be nice
Checkout the polarbar mailer (www.polarbar.org). Opensource, written in Java.
Dave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I forge my From: addresses routinely. (...) If they did some form of authenticated SMTP, such as SMTP-after- POP, they could let me.
In other words, you're sending a mail that appears to come from a ISP address, without ever being in contact with that ISP. Assuming there are rouge boxes out there, how could you possibly fix it without breaking your setup? I think the solution is fair - if you want to send with a @domain address, you must authenticate with the @domain servers somehow. If your ISP doesn't offer it now, I'm pretty sure they would if there was real demand for this feature. And if your tell your ISP that this will help reduce spam, they'll like it. They're not more fond of spam than you are (except those ISP profiting more from having spammers than getting spam, but they're few)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
personally, spam filtering at work is a royal pain in my butt. Corporate HQ is in charge of the spam filtering (they own the external mail gateways), so we have no control over the lists..
So, when we are trying to quote a customer for a "9-inch mirror" (we make optics), it gets filtered...
and, for some reason, "Take your next left" in an email to a customer giving them directions to our facility gets it blocked as spam...
I go through one or two a week, being tech-support, trying to figure out what is blocking the user's emails. Its a royal pain.
I send a message to cryto-gram, including a key. This key can then be used to send it to me
You want the newsletter, then it's up to you to make sure you can receive it. I think there's pretty near zero chance that Bruce is going to waste his time jumping through hoops for your benefit and your benefit alone. Well, ok, I won't speak for Bruce, but speaking as a Debian developer, if you send me a question or request for help, and my response bounces because I'm not on your whitelist, I'm simply going to delete your question/request, and will probably add your name to my killfile, just so I don't have to deal with that crap in the future.
The SpamAssassin Developers have already opened a bug to discuss this issue, but the "heavy scoring" contributors to it being spam-tagged would appear to be Razor and DCC.
i ?id=1490
Of course, it's always struck me odd that anyone would use DCC on any system they didn't want FP's on. DCC is a "bulk" email tracker, not a "spam" email tracker (ie: any mass-mailing should be in it, solicited or not).
At any rate, if you want to monitor the SpamAssassin bug regarding the Crypto-gram newsletter, you can read it here:
http://www.hughes-family.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cg
-Matt