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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