It's been a very long time since I ran a mail server, but for a decade or more I pumped all our outgoing mail through Hashcash because it gave a good boost to the Spam Assassin score. We'd crank it through the largest one, and it would add ~60sec to the mail delivery, unless we had a bunch of outgoing mail, but it was worth it I felt.
The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#52I've been using SpamAssassin since, well, forever, in internet terms. My recent facepalm moment was when I noticed that E-mails from the Playdate developer forum (Playdate is a really cool tiny gaming console) land in my spam folder, because anything in the .date domain (and the forum uses play.date as the domain) is assumed to be "dating spam".
Given the double meaning of “play date”, it’s not surprising that it would cause a higher score, even if it used a different TLD.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#53Earlier 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."
SpamAssassin has a Bayes filter that you can train with ham and spam. This has basically been a thing since forever.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I could but I don't want to, it's even more of a dark pattern and looks way too "spammish" IMO. I don't want my users to find this in their email and think that I'm trying to trick their system. Also I wouldn't be suprised if some antispam tries to detect this as a spam criteria.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for this feedback, I actually changed this because some of my clients complained of the opposite, that the link was a bit too "dim" and didn't look like the the obvious Call To Action in the email. But it's all very debatable I agree and I may change this again in the future.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've got sometimes a legitimate Google or MS dev newsletter emails going into their own spam folders :) .
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#57I've been using SpamAssassin since, well, forever, in internet terms. My recent facepalm moment was when I noticed that E-mails from the Playdate developer forum (Playdate is a really cool tiny gaming console) land in my spam folder, because anything in the .date domain (and the forum uses play.date as the domain) is assumed to be "dating spam".
I have deny listed most of those new funny tld as it’s indeed a good indication of spam. Here the face palm should be playdate’s because they have realized their domain looks like a spam domain.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks for this feedback, I actually changed this because some of my clients complained of the opposite, that the link was a bit too "dim" and didn't look like the the obvious Call To Action in the email. But it's all very debatable I agree and I may change this again in the future.
The link style wasn’t great before, just darker black with a faint underline. For best results, links should be underlined blue.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#59Having 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.
Part of the smart spammer approach is to condition people to what spam looks like, so you're more likely to let through the ones they really care about.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Gmail is successful because it naturally is the biggest honeypot. Most antispam API filters are like accumulators. When a trend is detected, the rest are protected. But overall, it's about scale.