I started using SpamAssassin to
filter my email. So far, it works great, although I notice that the default
scoring rules (which rate the “spamminess” of any “spam-indicators” a given
email contains) are rather Xenophobic. Specifically, they really don’t like
8-bit characters in the title (for example, Hebrew) or the printed-quotable
encoding for 8-bit text. Which means that it rates Hebrew email as Spam fairly
often (especially if it’s sent to a mailing list or something). This is annoying
because the labels it adds to Spam mail make the (Hebrew encoded) message
unreadable.
Yesterday
I also got my first false negatives – spam that managed to slip past the
filter. I think that as filtering software becomes more common, we’ll see
more “smarter” spam that tries to sneak past the filters using various tricks
– for example, a spam I got last night used the term “delisted” instead of
the more common “unsubscribe”. And to counter that, you can rewrite SpamAssassin’s
scoring rules, refining the selection process. It’s an evolutionary arms
race, live in your Inbox!
