What's in a name? - "spam" / "not spam"

[James Gray]

Mike Brudenell wrote:
> Greetings -
>
> Someone has just pointed out to me a slight problem with the text used to
> identify spam and non-spam in the "X-Blah-MailScanner-SpamCheck:" header
> when used with an IMAP server...
>
> For spam this heading looks something like this:
>
>    X-Blah-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (score=-4.8,
>            required 8, BAYES_00 -4.90, BIZ_TLD 0.10)
>
> and for non-spam something like this:
>
>    X-Blah-MailScanner-SpamCheck: spam, SpamAssassin (score=22.781,
>            required 8, autolearn=spam, BAYES_99 5.40,
>            DATE_IN_PAST_12_24 0.75, ... )
>

** SNIPPED **

> But choosing words that satisfy this whilst still being clear to users is
> proving trickier than I'd at first thought.

We had exactly the same problem and ditched the whole
"X-Blah-MailScanner-SpamCheck: ..." syntax and stuck with the original
SpamAssassin "X-Spam-Flag: YES/NO".  We also ONLY include this X-Header
when the message has been positively identified as spam.  That is the
"X-Spam-Flag: YES, (...scoring etc...)" is all our users will ever get.
  If the message is considered "ham" the header isn't included (the
scores are logged in the mail.log though).

Consequently our users can filter based on the existence (or absence) of
the "X-Spam-Flag" header, regardless of the YES/NO setting.

Drop me a line off-list if you want to see the MailScanner.conf and
languages.conf settings.

Cheers,

James

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