On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 09:07, Dan Wing wrote:
Ergo, facilitating heuristics is bad?
I'm not following the logic, but it must just be me. I don't see how
or why facilitating heuristics is bad -- for email, source IP
addresses, Subject line content, mismatched rfc821.from/rfc822.from,
body content ("Viagra", image/jpg, image/gif), are all useful as input
to a heuristic function.
I believe you're arguing that the sole purpose of duplicating header
information is to facilitate heuristics for use by a SpamAssassin-like
function, and that such duplication of header information has no other
purpose. Is that correct?
Much of the spam today looks very much like the few lines added at the
end of the typical web mail service or the list server. Who would be
accountable for spam added at the end, when it must be ignored by
signature validation? What was once innocent and heuristically ignored
soon becomes the norm for spammers. Keeping this behavior to a minimum
does ensure greater protection from abuse.
Requiring those that make changes to resign the message does ensure this
process identifies those accountable. A header could be included to
allow signature validation to be cascaded.
-Doug