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The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

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Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#41

Post by jeffbee »

thesuitonym wrote: post #24
jeffbee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not and has never been a good classifier. If open AI fans want to contribute something of value to society, they would train a spam classifier on a large, manually-labeled corpus of mail, where the features include envelope data. That would get open source maybe 10% of the way to Gmail quality, or 100x better than SA.

I hope against hope that AI spam detection never becomes a thing. At least with today's methods, I can tell a person why their message was marked as spam. If AI detection becomes the norm, all I can do is shrug and say, "Sorry, it's the algorithm."

Gmail has used machine learning to classify spam since its creation.

https://workspace.google.com/blog/identity-and-security/an-o...

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#42

Post by bombcar »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #10
londons_explore wrote: post #7

Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits... Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin

>smart spammer I am sure there are plenty of smart spammers, but it also seems like a lot of spam comes from folks using scripts and email lists they use without fully understanding. It appears SpamAssassin would help with those operations.

I'm starting to think the smart spammers are the ones selling worthless spam tools to the dumb spammers, because so much spam is entirely unactionable.

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#43

Post by kjs3 »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits... Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin

it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin

Bingo. Not that there aren't a lot of people running SA, but spammers want to be able to deliver to the big players(1) (gmail, o365, etc), not the size folks out there running SA. It's not worth their time to devote effort to optimizing for a rounding error in the deliverability equation.

(1) Unless they're selling 'targeting' services where you're paying to deliver to a specific domain/user which might be behind SA. Plenty do, but that's a little bit farther down the criminality spectrum and vastly less volume than shilling peener pills or warranty extension scams.

edit: formatting

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#44

Post by layer8 »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits... Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin

It’s effectively no different from a spammer running their spam mails through a local SpamAssassin to see how it goes, and tweaking them until they pass.

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#45

Post by chrismorgan »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits... Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin

The vast majority of operations in these fields are mind-bogglingly simplistic.

Well-known rules will block most spam, some with occasional collateral damage but many with no realistic chance of collateral damage.

Entity-encoding @ as @ in email addresses in HTML will block the vast majority of email address harvesters, with no collateral damage.

Adding a honeypot field to an HTML form, with the label “If you are human, leave this field blank” and hidden by CSS, will catch practically all spam submissions, with no collateral damage.

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#46

Post by layer8 »

adrienjarthon wrote: post #30
uean wrote: post #27

I love the analysis. But I hate that the 'fixed' email ends up being wordier for no reason at all. Brevity has value. Having to bloat content (an email to get past anti-spam; a cooking blog to rank better within Google SEO; ...) brings back memories of high-school english papers, or the modern equivalent ChatGPT.

100% agree, I also hate that I had to do this.

Couldn’t you add some “hidden” text instead, e.g. white on white or display:none?

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#47

Post by kjs3 »

bombcar wrote: post #42
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>smart spammer I am sure there are plenty of smart spammers, but it also seems like a lot of spam comes from folks using scripts and email lists they use without fully understanding. It appears SpamAssassin would help with those operations.

I'm starting to think the smart spammers are the ones selling worthless spam tools to the dumb spammers, because so much spam is entirely unactionable.

[dead]

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#48

Post by ceejayoz »

nradov wrote: post #39
rlpb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bonus to them that every time they block a smaller host there is a good chance that sender will consider a move to office365 or Google Workspace for their mail. The irony is that a substantial amount of the spam I receive comes from those platforms.

Are you certain the spam is actually coming from IP addresses controlled by those platforms? It's common for spammers to fake the SMTP headers.

I get plenty of spam from Gmail accounts with SPF and DKIM passing.

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#49

Post by chrismorgan »

adrienjarthon wrote: post #30
uean wrote: post #27

I love the analysis. But I hate that the 'fixed' email ends up being wordier for no reason at all. Brevity has value. Having to bloat content (an email to get past anti-spam; a cooking blog to rank better within Google SEO; ...) brings back memories of high-school english papers, or the modern equivalent ChatGPT.

100% agree, I also hate that I had to do this.

Another piece of feedback: the link doesn’t look like a link any more. It wasn’t great before, but the verbiage made it adequately clear. But now it’s terrible, because the wording doesn’t suggest an action, and it doesn’t look like a link or a button. You should either restore its underline and lean into “link”, or give a background colour or (generally better) gradient and lean into “button”. But when it’s just a border, it doesn’t look like a button, especially when there’s a tick after it. And change the wording again.

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

#50

Post by Anthony-G »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits... Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin

Spammers seem to be really lazy. The only time I’ve received spam on my own domain was when I changed servers and forgot to enable the Postgrey service. Grey-listing has been around for long enough (a couple of decades) so I would have expected spammers to be resending emails that are rejected with a temporary error.

So I wasn’t expecting Postgrey to provide much benefit. As it happens, in 10 years of running my own mail server, it’s the only anti-spam measure I’ve had to bother with.

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