SpamAssassin doesn't block mails, it just marks the messages as to whether they're probably spam or not.  If someone is blocking based on the results, we can't help you.  Please contact postmaster@<that site> with your concerns.

Subject: Re: [SAdev]  New: Spam Assissan is killing friendlies

Note: I'm not a SA developer, but I sometimes try to help out.

If you can provide a specific sample email outlining a specific problem, 
using bugzilla's attach feature and preferably in mbox format, the SA devs 
can analyze it and use it when tuning SA to avoid false positives. Make 
sure whatever submission format you use has complete headers and has not 
had the message encoding changed.

Please ensure that the email is actually marked by SA 2.44 or higher, if 
someone is still running old versions like 2.31, there's nothing anyone can 
do to fix their site because they aren't applying upgrades and it is a 
system administration problem. If we "fix" the problem, their site will 
remain broken because they aren't applying updates, and its actually quite 
likely it's already been fixed anyway.

In general there is always an ongoing extensive effort in SA to avoid false 
positives, but general bug reports without any explicit examples don't 
help. There's no definition of the problem here. 2.43 and higher are 
substantially less likely to false positive than 2.31 and earlier versions 
due to GA tuning of the DNSBL scores and the presence of a larger variety 
of compensation rules. This effort is continuing at all times, and if you 
can provide SA with good examples, it can aid that effort.




At 11:09 AM 2/5/2003 -0800, bugzilla-daemon@hughes-family.org wrote:
>Please let me know what you are doing to fix this.

Theo's comment is not strictly true. Why else would Justin subscribe to a 
million mailing lists in an attempt to ensure that SpamAssassin does a better 
job of distinguishing non-spam mailing lists from real spam?

The right answer is that the person who submitted this bug report should add a 
link to his mailing list so Justin can subscribe to it and add it to the non-
spam corpus so future versions of SpamAssassin might be friendlier to it.

The other part of the answer is that his subscribers who have mail filtered 
through SpamAssassin should be made aware of the whitelist facility.

Subject: Re: [SAdev]  Spam Assissan is killing friendlies

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 12:39:40PM -0800, bugzilla-daemon@hughes-family.org wrote:
> Theo's comment is not strictly true. Why else would Justin subscribe to a 
> million mailing lists in an attempt to ensure that SpamAssassin does a better 
> job of distinguishing non-spam mailing lists from real spam?
> 
> The right answer is that the person who submitted this bug report should add a 
> link to his mailing list so Justin can subscribe to it and add it to the non-
> spam corpus so future versions of SpamAssassin might be friendlier to it.

Thank you, but the complaint was that he was getting bounces.  We can't help with that.

If he wants to attach a sample message, we can look at what's getting hit,
but it's still not going to help bouncing.

Subject: Re: [SAdev]  Spam Assissan is killing friendlies

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 12:47:49PM -0800, bugzilla-daemon@hughes-family.org wrote:
> Thank you, but the complaint was that he was getting bounces.  We can't help with that.

BTW: bounces indicate blocking at MTA, so no user whitelists are involved.
another reason to contact postmaster. :)

Subject: Re: [SAdev]  Spam Assissan is killing friendlies

(attaching to the bug this time, instead of the list, oops)

For what it's worth, I subscribed to mike's newsletter, It was NOT tagged 
by SA 2.43. In fact, it scored quite low. Thus, this entire complaint is 
moot. Current stable versions of SpamAssassin don't tag his emails.

I'm using razor2 and most DNSBLs are enabled so it's not in razor2, and 
there aren't any major DNSBL listing of his servers (see added note below 
about OSIRUSOFT). The message itself is properly formatted, doesn't trigger 
any header rules, and the body rules matched are low scoring.

Sounds like old versions might be tagging it and this bug would appear to 
have already been fixed. If you could only force the admins in question to 
stop running ancient versions of SA.....

X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (score=1.8, required 5.5,
	EXCUSE_14, SPAM_PHRASE_05_08)


Also a run of 
http://relays.osirusoft.com/cgi-bin/rbcheck.cgi?addr=66.70.73.200  shows 
his mailserver is listed by OSIRUSOFT, which is a DNSBL that has a high 
score in old versions of spamassassin, but due to high false positive rate 
has a very low score in 2.43 (0.38). I myself have OSIRUSOFT disabled, 
along with any other DNSBL with a score under 0.5.


So the proper score for a "Default" SA 2.43 would be about 2.2, which is 
still way less than 5.0 needed to tag in a default setup.

However an older version would give a much higher score, but again, that's 
an old version, it's been fixed, and there's NOTHING we can do about system 
admins which are too stubborn or ignorant to upgrade their servers to a 
recent version of spamassassin, or those that have reconfigured their 
systems to bounce spam based on SA.

The system admin in question could also have lowered the threshold to 2.0 
(ack!) or bumped the score for OSIRUSOFT up to 10.0 (ack! ack!).. but 
there's nothing we can do about that either.

And Theo is correct. The proper usage and intent of SpamAssassin does NOT 
include bouncing/autoresponding/autodeleting. It's intended to be a tagger. 
Any other use is possible, but not an application intended by SA's design 
and it's manually done by a site admin, and it's nothing that changing 
SpamAssassin can "fix" anyway.

 From the SpamAssassin main page, the intended application:

"Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later 
filtering using the user's own mail user-agent application."

That's it.