SpamAssassin at SMTP time with exim

Tue May 7 15:28:51 PDT 2002

On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 02:48:35PM -0700, Danny Howard wrote:
> 
> Lastly, I'd just as soon spammers not catch on that their messages are
> being filtered, based on heuristic properties that they can avoid.  I
> have a sneaky suspicion that a handful of spammers are already checking
> their messages against SpamAssassin.  I have a feeling that before long,
> SpamAssasin will lose its efficacy, thanks to an ever-increasing spiral
> of spammers making SA-friendly e-mails, and SA having to adapt to ever
> more ingenious heuristics.

I disagree, at least as long as spamassassin, or systems like it are used by
the minority of users. For now spamassassin appears to work only with UNIX.

UNIX users are already less than 1% of spam recipients. UNIX users who use
spamassassin are only a tiny fraction of that. It's not worth a spammer's
time to format a message such that it gets past spamassassin for that very
small percentage of users, espeically since that group of users tend to act
most unfavorably towards spam.

In fact, looking at this way if they were to spend any time or energy on it,
and they won't, they would rather have all their spam be caught by
spamassassin so they didn't have to deal with us complaining to their ISP.

The corollary to this their is that it also in our best interest to never
port spamassassin to a more popular platform and just keep this goody for
ourselves.