On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:39:25 -0600
"McDonald, Dan" <dan.mcdon...@austinenergy.com> wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2009, at 8:13 AM, "Bowie Bailey" <bowie_bai...@buc.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Christian Brel wrote:
> >> The point comes back to this and it has *not* been answered
> >> sensibly; WHY DOES SPAMASSASSIN DEFAULT INSTALL WITH A NEGATIVE
> >> SCORING RULE THAT
> >> FAVOURS A COMMERCIAL BULK MAILER. Namely the negative score for
> >> Habeas?
>
> Because it allows desired mail to be delivered, while permitting
> more aggressive rules to detect spam, even if those same techniques
> are sometimes used by legitimate bulk mailers.
Is there some kind of citation to support this at all? If so would it
not be appropriate to add every white list favouring bulkersso that all
'legitimate' bulk mail - not just that leading back to Habeas.... >
Return Path - flows easily around the so called aggressive
rules?
>
> >
> > ("legitimate mail" in this context means mail that the end user
> > wishes to receive...bulk or otherwise)
If it's legitimate, and the user wants it *give them the option to set
the minus score* don't ****ASSUME**** they want it because they once
bought a keychain or snowstorm from spamersrus.whatever.
>
> Quite right. Now, can we drop this? Or is the black-helicopter
> crowd able to produce masscheck results that show better accuracy
> without those distributed whitelists so that they can argue with
> facts that they can do a better job?
Selective default whitelisting in an anti-spam program attracts fair
suspicion. Quite apart from the smell of corruption, there is a clear
and fair augment of anti-competitive behaviour. Other commercial emails
that don't employ Habeas / Return Path cannot expect similar transit.
I'm no lawyer, but given recent US goings on with e360-v-Spamhaus, it's
probably not ideal to keep this scoring.
Naturally it's an emotive issue with those that stand to lose as a
result of such normalisation getting quite vocal, or trying to
discredit a point of view. It's a simple, sensibe and fair request to
zero the scores applied on whitelists and add advice in the docs.
People here are all to happy to yell 'RTFM' after all.
Which answer sits better with an end user:
a. Why is spam getting through my anti-spam
b. Why is my bulk email scoring so high?
It's also fair to say any ESP such as Return Path taking money to
deliver mail should be optimising it {or offering advice on
optimisation) so it does *not* score high. Otherwise what are their
customers paying them for?
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