> > The BADHEADERS and MAILFROM tests are also
> > good; they only catch spam (and mail sent from broken or seriously
> > misconfigured mail clients that might not get delivered anyways).
>There are many senders of BADHEADERS that people would like to receive
>E-mail from.
There are? I haven't found them.
>These are mostly automated programs such as "I forgot my
>password" e-mailers, shopping cart order notifications, signup
>confirmations, etc. (This doesn't include those spams that pretend to be
>signup confirmations, your password access to the spammer porn site of the
>day, etc).
I think you're confusing the BADHEADERS and SPAMHEADERS tests. The
BADHEADERS test looks for illegal headers that are common in spam, whereas
the SPAMHEADERS test looks for legal headers that are common in spam.
Those shopping cart and other web programmers often try to cut corners by
sending technically legal headers that the RFCs do not recommend. That
causes them to fail the SPAMHEADERS test. The SPAMHEADERS test works well
with the new weighting system, so that if an E-mail fails the SPAMHEADERS
test, it won't be marked as spam unless some other test(s) fail as well.
The BADHEADERS test will only fail on spam and E-mail sent from completely
broken mail clients. If someone uses a shopping cart or whatever that
sends broken headers, they are asking for trouble. For example, a common
problem is that the shopping cart people make up their own non-existent
time zones. When they do this, if the E-mail does make it to the end user,
it will likely end up at the top of their inbox so they might not see it
for weeks. Other mail clients could possibly crash, or just delete the
E-mail. That's why the BADHEADERS test is so good; it catches perhaps 50%
of spam, but only catches legitimate mail if it was sent from a broken
client, and would likely not make it to the end user anyways.
-Scott
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