They are two different sets of tests, although E-mails that fail one are likely to fail the other.Scott, do you recommend using both BADHEADERS and SPAMHEADERS? I use both, along with the LOOSENSPAMHEADERS directive, and I'm wondering if SPAMHEADERS incorporates BADHEADERS... It seems that when I see SPAMHEADERS, I very often see BADHEADERS.
Both check for spam-like headers that will rarely, if ever, appear in E-mail from legitimate mail clients. The difference is that the BADHEADERS test looks for headers that are illegal (not RFC compliant), whereas the SPAMHEADERS test looks for ones that are RFC compliant.
I personally do not recommend using LOOSENSPAMHEADERS, as that will significantly reduce the amount of spam that the SPAMHEADERS test will catch. It will help prevent catching some legitimate mail as spam, but only from people who know that their mail will get caught as spam (or wrote software without looking at the RFCs) -- and if they know it will get caught as spam, well, they don't care much in my opinion. As spam gets worse, legitimate mailers that send problem E-mails are going to have to fix the problems; they might as well do it sooner rather than later. FWIW, we assist any legitimate mailers that contact us about header problems, even though they aren't customers of ours.
It's *very* important to note that the BADHEADERS test will only be set off from broken mailservers (or broken mail clients). It will not catch legitimate mail. In most cases, the E-mail that fails the BADHEADERS test will either never reach the recipient, or get hidden at the bottom of the inbox behind old mail.On the other hand, maybe I'm just getting used to seeing BADHEADERS in Spam Review because so many mailing lists set it off!
That's typically a throwback to the Technology Bubble, where CEOs would say "Let's hire a team of web programmers to write a web app to send out mail!", and they would hire people with great web programming resumes that have never written an actual Internet program (having written plenty of web apps, where the only rule is that the program needs to do what it is designed to do). They then would play around and get something that seemed to work, and say "We did it!". If people break the rules, they've got to face the consequences.I haven't used your web lookup tool much, but I'm getting used to seeing the date violation code in both.
On the other hand, I should also say that we don't block any E-mail here. We do handle spam differently, but never actually block it.
-Scott
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