Happy New Year from SpamAssassin [LWN.net]

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 1, 2010 18:57 UTC (Fri) by dark (guest, #8483)
In reply to: Happy New Year from SpamAssassin by PO8
Parent article: Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

The problem with such time-dependent rules is that it is hard to measure their effectiveness. Their evaluation of existing archives (of preclassified mail) is going to change with time, usually for the worse.

And it does need to be measured. There's no obvious reason why spam would be more likely to have bad date headers than ham. I've been using Debian long enough to remember when the alpha port had system clock issues; I have a lot of ham from 2020 in my mail folders :)

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Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 1, 2010 19:31 UTC (Fri) by rbuchmann (guest, #52862) [Link] (1 responses)

Some spammers try to have their spam always on top in the mailbox by using dates in the future.

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 2, 2010 4:59 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

That is why I use Sort By Arrival in the re-alpine MUA. Well, I use it not because of the spammers, but because of course people from all timezones can send me mail, and I rather prefer that new items get tacked onto the inbox list at the end rather than somewhere in the middle (a little prone to oversee it when you have lots).

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 1, 2010 19:47 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That depends on what relative dates are relative to. Generally the top "Received" date is trustworthy, since it's provided by the user's own mail server, and it's what ought to be close to the "Date" date. It doesn't matter when the mail is scanned, of course.