http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3299
------- Additional Comments From [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2004-04-25 10:54 ------- See, Spamassassin attempts a difficult task, carefully separating "good" email from "bad" (spam) email by analyzing its contents. The main reason I can think of for it to not also try to detect viruses is that it greatly increases the complexity of the task, since SA then would have to also separate "good" MS executables that Windows users sometimes send each other from "bad" ones, by analyzing the contents against virus signature libraries and so forth. However, for non-Windows users, that difficulty does not exist. Any email that contains any MS executable of any sort is bad, 100% of the time, since such a user will never receive any legitimate email with MS executables. Also, in technical terms, the distinction between spam and viruses is not so clear and gets less clear every day. As blacklists get more effective, spammers resort to spreading viruses through spam messages to take over users' machines and send more spam. Spam is a virus vector and viruses are a spam vector. While it's true that some viruses are sent by people other than spammers, more and more of them come from spammers and therefore are spam. While it's fine that SA declares analyzing specific executables to be beyond its scope, the mere preference of an executable is definitely correlated with spam, just like the word "mortage" in a message is correlated with spam. Both should have scores. So, IMO, the MICROSOFT_EXECUTABLE should NOT be removed from SA 3.0., but rather it should be extended to check for executables inside zip attachments. ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.
