> From: Mike Hogsett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > I think my main point is this... treating hoaxes as spam is a bad > > idea. An ideal add-on or improvement to SpamAssassin would be to have > > some way to deal with unwanted personal e-mails - but spam is bulk and > > hoaxes are personal. Those two don't mix well. > > I fully respect your thoughts on this, and its probably the > correct one, > but I personally see two classes of email, 'mail I want' and 'mail I > don't'. > > I feel that hoaxes, like spam, are in the 'mail I don't' class. > > My $0.02. > > - Mike
There's a fine line between relieving users of a globally perceived nuisance (spam) and becoming the "email police" who abuse our power to socially engineer things for our own convenience. There are plenty of email-client-side tools available to fine-tune your personal likes and dislikes. Granted, hoaxes are basically useless, but that's not the same thing as unsolicited commercial email. Selling your users on an anti-spam system and then trying to extend that license to hoaxes is a bad idea. An anti-hoax system would be a good idea, though. I'm thinking along the lines of a *** HOAX *** subject tag, or an X-Hoax-Status header. Regardless, the name of the software is SpamAssassin, not EmailIDontWantAssassin - or UnproductiveEmailAssassin. What's next, rules to detect and block common email jokes that wander the internet? Some hoaxes are sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to be considered jokes - consider the Dihydrogen Monoxide warnings: http://www.dhmo.org/ I'd be interested to hear what the DCC/Pyzor/Razor folks think about this issue. It must come up in their camps all the time.
