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

[Scott Silva]

| 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, ... )
|
How about       ": spam" (colon space spam)
and           ": not spam"




| The problem arises when trying to use client-side filtering with an IMAP
| mail program.  Such can be set to query the IMAP server to check the text
| of a particular message header.  However the IMAP specification stipulates
| that this match is as a case-insensitive substring.
|
| Thus setting up a search to check the "X-Blah-MailScanner-SpamCheck"
header
| for the word "spam" matches both spam and not-spam messages.  (The
converse
| -- checking for non-spam messages by looking for "not spam" is fine.)
|
| I am pondering changing the wording of one or both of these two strings in
| the languages.conf file.  The aim is to use wording such that neither is a
| case-insensitive substring of the other.
|
| But choosing words that satisfy this whilst still being clear to users is
| proving trickier than I'd at first thought.  Possibilities I've toyed with
| so far are:
|
|     spam                not spam
|     ----                --------
|     *spam*              not spam        (wildcards + problems if *s
omitted)
|     spammy              not spam        (too colloquial?)
|     probable spam       not spam        (doesn't fit high-scoring spam
well)
|     spam                genuine         (implies approval of leak-thru
spam)
|     spam                legitimate      (ditto)
|     spam                pukka           (do most staff/students know
pukka?)
|
| Bearing in mind this is a "difficult to change subsequently" setting once
| people have started using it in their filters I was wondering if any other
| sites had taken this step to address the problem?
|
| Cheers,
|
| Mike B-)
|
| --
| The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York Yo10 5DD, UK
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|
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