Some people are trying too hard.

[reynardo]

Two pieces of email arrived in my inbox today marked:

***** SPAM ******

PNC: Planet Netcom's anti-spam server has detected that this email is most
PNC: likely spam. As such, the subject has been altered so that you can
PNC: recognise or block similar unwanted email in the future, using the
PNC: built-in mail filtering support in your mail reader.


I'm amused. One of the emails was a wally laughing about the latest Nigerian scam, and including the phone numbers and addresses.

The other, though, was just an email from a student wanting to sell some textbooks.

The ISP counts up points and calls "SPAM" if they get over 5 points. Points are awarded for things like:

PNC: Hit! (1.6 points) From: ends in numbers
(unfortunately, not unusual in student-number-based email addresses, but also with Yahoo and such)

PNC: Hit! (0.8 points) BODY: Contains a line >=199 characters long
(which happens when autowraps are applied. Also if the twit has left on HTML mail)

PNC: Hit! (2.7 points) BODY: Mutated Nigerian scams
(Ok, this one is fair)

PNC: Hit! (1.8 points) No MX records for the From: domain
(I have no idea what this means)

PNC: Hit! (3.9 points) Forged yahoo.com 'Received:' header found
(Actually, it wasn't forged. The mail had been sent through a mailing list. This means that every time someone from a web-based mail address sends something through the list, it's going to be marked at 1.6 + 3.9 = 5.5 points and thus as possible spam.)

I receive DAILY Asian "hot girls" spam in non-english text. This has never been filtered.

I've asked them to remove this filter. I figure I can deal with my own spam.

Comments

[barberio.livejournal.com]

It looks like they are using a filter called spamassassin, which is a quite good spam filter, if you configure it right. (I use it myself) Its not intended as a blanket multi-user filter, and has to be individualy adjusted for each user.

So, basicaly, good intentions, good tools, fscked up implimentation.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Also, the recent versions will do adaptive matching to adjust. So if you recive regular e-mails from someone which are obviously not spam it will adjust the score downwards if it gets a suspect one in the future. But this isnt enabled by default, and needs to be run for a while before it starts to work well.

I'm testing a recent update to see if the problem with yahoo mailing lists is fixed.

No MX records...

[ex-cerebrate131.livejournal.com]

MX records are the bits of the DNS used to find the mail server to deliver your mail to; so that error usually means one of:

a) it really *is* a spammer, who doesn't *want* to receive any mail. This one is still leading the pack, slightly ahead of...

b) the mail is sent from a domain managed by an ISP whose admins are too stupid to get a simple DNS entry right, and are desperately needing a visit from the System Admins' Guild's Guido to explain to them why Letting The Side Down Like That Isn't Nice, which - alas for my profession - is about as often as...

c) the mail was sent by a user who was not only sufficiently clueless to spam-block his address, but is so clueless that he does it when sending private e-mail, not just public foo. But you probably don't want to get mail from anyone like that anyway, so who cares?

Hope this helps!

(Re the Asian "hot girls" - I deal with that by filtering any incoming mail not in pure ASCII, which kills most of them. Well, that and the Chinese hot peppers and the hotel newsletter from Hong Kong.)