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Re: [OT UCSC] Re: delivery notification on client?

2003-04-12 01:35:33

On Friday, Apr 11, 2003, at 14:42 US/Pacific, Bart Schaefer wrote:

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Tyler F. Creelan wrote:

John Rudd wrote:

X-UCSC-KZIN-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-UCSC-KZIN-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (score=-4.5,
        required 5, IN_REP_TO, SUBJ_ENDS_IN_Q_MARK)

Does this mean someone is running UCSC's outgoing mail through
spamassassin?

It means they're running all their mail, inbound and outbound, through
MailScanner, which happens to have the SpamAssassin module installed.

They probably didn't _intend_ to scan the outbound mail, but there's no
way to tell.

KZIN is a reference to my workstation (kzin.ucsc.edu). We have 4 sets of headers here:

X-UCSC-CATS-* (our central campus IT group is CATS, of which I am one of the sysadmins)

X-UCSC-KZIN-* (my workstation, which I also used to use for testing different mailscanner cofnigs)

X-UCSC-TEST-* (the current test servers for all mail stuff based around sendmail)

X-UCSC-PO-* (being used for testing our communigate pro mail server, as we're probably going to move that direction this summer)

For the non-KZIN servers, we don't do spam checks if it's from our campus (which is sort of the same as being "outbound", but not actually). For "kzin", I don't care one way or the other, it's not like I'm sending spammy messages, so I don't mind if it gets marks. It ends up that mail sent from me via an SMTP session (netscape client on my workstation or MAIL.app running on my laptop) gets scanned by mailscanner and thus marked. Mail sent by me via command line clients doesn't (just the way things end up working through mailscanner). I could tell it not to scan messages from me, but like I said -- I don't actually care one way or the other.


Though, I notice I'm not the only one. Someone's got X-Spam-* (default spam assassin) headers being added to messages on this list. Since they're the default headers, there's no easy way to figure out whose server is doing it. I personally don't mind whether my outgoing mail is being rated for its spammy-ness ... but I do mind "not knowing which rating came from which source". We use custom headers here so that our users have some way of knowing which rating came from us and not from someone else.


Several people have been complaining on the SpamAssassin list because of sites tagging outbound mail this way, particularly when the tagging is a
"false positive" (labeled spam when not) which goes to a mailing list.

The only people who will notice are people who happen to be looking for X-UCSC-KZIN-MailScanner-(SpamCheck|SpamScore) headers (assuming I would happen to send a message that was spammy). Again, because I'm not using the default headers and I don't do things like subject marking. The complaints on the spam-assassin list are also coming from situations where the user doesn't know that spam checks are happening and then complains when their mail turns up marked as spam. 1) there was a campus announcement for our campus wide scanning (which shouldn't affect outbound mail anyway because we only scan messages that don't claim to be from here), 2) on kzin, I'm the only user being affected -- if I happen to send a message that gets marked as spam, I wont be ignorant of the situation.


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