Re: Interaction with anti-spam systems (was Re: A spammer subscribed to this list ? )

[wayne <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <20040805161137.C46DB17109@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Alan DeKok" <aland@xxxxxx> writes:

> Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx> wrote:
>> Wether MARID encourage or discourages it will make no
>> difference. Scores of the various tests in SpamAssassin are not
>> determined by an human trying to guess wether "sex" should be more an
>> indication of spam than "viagra", or less. Scores are determined by
>> using the actual tests against a corpus of spam and a corpus of
>> ham. See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/HowScoresAreAssigned.
>
>   I am saying that we know a-priori, that giving positive marks to
> messages which pass SPF checks is not a good idea.
>
>   Your statement also appears to contradict Wayne's assertion about
> Spamassassin.

In Spamassassin, the more postivie the score, the more spammy the
message was found.  Giving a positive score for a pass from SPF is not
a good idea because an SPF pass is neither a sign of spam nor ham.
Failing an SPF check is a spam sign according to their genetic
alogrithm. 

Stephane's statements do not controdict mine, other than I didn't
correct your confusion over negative vs positive scores.  Stephane
explained *how* Spamassassin comes up with their numbers, I just
mentioned the result.


>> Do note that, at the present time, the scores of all SPF-related tests
>> are very low (probably reflecting the small number of SPF-enabled
>> domains). See http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests.html and search for
>> SPF.
>
>   Which has a "-0.001" for SPF_PASS, or marking the message as somehow
> "better" for passing SPF.

As others have pointed out, this has no real effect, it only means
that the results gets put into the headers.


-wayne