Comments on: Spam Filtering in Mozilla

By: Matti

Matti — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

The headers are different from product to product.
I use spampal and it adds x-spampal
BTW: Why do you don’t use a product that also does bayes itself and not only fixed rules (scoring) and DNSBL
?

By: Jesse Ruderman

Jesse Ruderman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

When my college’s mail server detects spam, it adds:

X-Spam-Status, X-Spam-Level (as a number of stars), X-Spam-Report, X-Spam-Flag, X-Spam-Checker-Version (SpamAssassin 2.53 (1.174.2.15-2003-03-30-exp))

and the Subject is changed to start with “*****SPAM*****”.

By: dave

dave — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

I don’t get it. I’ve only just started looking at this stuff but it doesn’t add up for me.

Surely Mozilla’s bayesian filter already looks at the email headers and therefore these spam headers are already highly correlated with spam.

So, as far as I can tell, of the three options you outline:

“Feed Mozilla’s Bayes” is already being done,

“GIve weight to x-spam status” is the kind of �ber-geeky feature that gives Mozilla a bad name, and…

“An option to use X-spam-status over bayes testing” would hide a non-personalizable spam filter behind the UI for a personalizable one, rendering marking mail as spam/ham meaningless in regard to how spamassassin marks future mail.

This last option appears to achieve the same effect as simply switching off Mozilla’s spam filter and defining rules for these headers (or subject line additions).

So perhaps spam-filter specific extensions are the way to go, if people really need that functionality, but I can’t see the benefit myself.