Can someone give me the "short version" of how Imail's anti-spam works, and
why a message with a "bad" word in the subject would get through?
The problem is that you can't block E-mail based on a bad word. Otherwise, you'll find problems like E-mail about breast cancer disappearing, or E-mail from Mr. Dick Hitchcock never being received.
Anti-spam software either takes one or more criteria (such as a Bayesian filter or the SPAMCOP test), and blocks the E-mail based on a single test, or it runs a number of tests, and determines the "spamminess" based on the results of all the tests. IMail v8's anti-spam does a combination, where it will normally block on a single criterion, but also allows you to set up a certain number of specific tests that need to fail before blocking the E-mail.
So in the case, you could simply set up a filter that blocks the E-mail if it has "badword" in the subject. But, that runs the risk of deleting good E-mail. So typically the best anti-spam programs will factor everything in, and base the results on all the tests. That way, if it sees the bad word in the subject -- but no other problems -- the E-mail will get through. But if there are other problems (such as illegal headers, which is quite common in spam), it can get caught.
-Scott
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