Yeh that's my point.  It's not razor that's doing any rejecting. It's
the postmaster who has integrated razor into his system and configured
his MTA to reject based on razor results.  They know that they are going
to drop false positives but they weigh it out against the overall
objective and choose to reject.  It's the postmaster who is censoring
and it's up to their userbase to do something about it.  They have their
supposed opt-in mailing list, send those people a message about it and
if that opt-in user really cares then they'll deal with their sysadm. If
they don't like the idea of email being blocked then they can switch to
a new email service provider.  If it's a case of a corporate or business
environment doing the blocking then they have the right to block since
it's is their resources being used for non-business activity. 

If you've been using razor since v1 and been in the mailings all along
then you'd know that TES was the answer to the problem of people
submitting false positives.  I really don't see what is expected to be
done here.  Does Marc want razor to be hard-coded to ignore his mass
mailings... It's not going to happen.  Does he want the person who
submitted it blocked... That won't happen either.  Who knows, it could
actually be more than one person who reported his mailing as spam.

Razor is based on open-source code so instead of saying it's broken and
it needs to be fixed, suggest how that can be done.  Check the website,
the last sentence on How I can Help says..."And, finally, you can help
by contributing code (see the task list for what remains to be done)"

If they are rejecting based on Razor results then they could be doing
the same for SA or DCC.  Are you going to go to the folks who write the
code for those products and raise the same complaint.  What if was being
blocked by a system using Brightmail, which is being used by ATT
Worldnet,Verizon,CableVision, etc...even MSN.  Are you going to complain
that brightmail needs to be fixed.  The problem has spam email has
redefined by people it as any unwanted email.  Yeh you might say that
they could just unsubscribe but anymore people can't trust such actions
because 
1) the message is forged with no real unsubscribe function
2) you unsubscribe but still get the mailings
3) and of course... it's a trick to confirm a valid email address which
then gets the onslaught

So what do they do, they report it as spam aka unwanted email and let
what every filtering system they use deal with it.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Apthorpe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003 5:29 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Razor-users] Turning Razor into a censorship tool


On Sat, 22 Feb 2003 15:55:17 -0500
"Rose, Bobby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I don't think Vipul or Jordon can look at a hash and know whether it's

> spam or not.  Remember, it's hashes of the message body and not the 
> actualy message body that is necessarily being sent.
> 
> Also, I don't think this thread is going to resolve anything.

Well, that's defeatist... :)

> Besides,
> who cares if a message is being tagged as spam so long as it's being 
> delivered.  Note that I said "tagged".  Razor, SA, pyzor, etc are not 
> MTA and don't come with any code to drop a message into the 
> bit-bucket.

YMMV. You can run Razor from within SpamAssassin within Amavis within
Postfix (or within MimeDefang within Sendmail or within something within
Exim, etc.) and use it to reject mail during the SMTP phase or silently
discard the mail before final delivery to the user.

Admonishments to the contrary, sysadmins frequently use tools in ways
the authors don't intend. For example, rejecting at the SMTP phase saves
a lot of resources downstream which translates into real money. You
shouldn't do this unless you're sure you're rejecting crap and the gray
area is your local definition of 'sure.'

> If a postmaster is using a setup that drops a message based on it's 
> spaminess instead of delivering then it's not the fault of the 
> antispam product.  The complaint should be with the postmaster and how

> they are using the product not the product.  If you don't know who to 
> complain such as [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] then notify the 
> person on your list that their newsletter couldn't be delivered 
> because their postmaster is blocking it.

True, but if you can fix the product, you reduce the
competence/attention level required of thousands of local admins. Given
limited time and energy, is it easier to fix one product or retrain
thousands of admins? In this case, the fix makes the product better and
more accurate for everyone, it's not just a quick exception for one
mailing list.

-- Bob


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