[spambayes-dev] Re: Generating SB tokens based upon information on the net

Skip Montanaro skip at pobox.com
Wed Aug 4 19:20:35 CEST 2004


    Brad> In the case of reverse DNS, all that work will already have been
    Brad> done by the system before you ever get the message.  

Apologies, my bad.

    Brad> Or, you could just parse the content of the appropriate headers
    Brad> that we just added.

Spambayes will root around in the Received: headers if you ask it to.  It
generates all sorts of tokens based on fragments of IP addresses and
hostnames it finds.  Perhaps it's already doing what you wanted and I failed
to make the connection in my original note.


    Brad> If we're not doing DNS blacklist lookups within SpamBayes, then I
    Brad> think we need to seriously look at adding that capability in some
    Brad> other fashion.  My experience has been that these are some of the
    Brad> most important information sources you can have available to you
    Brad> when attempting to score a message for spam probability.

There's no need to do blacklisting as far as I'm concerned.  Spambayes
already mines content from the sender fields, so (for example), mail
purporting to come from "billr at smart.net" generates tokens which are highly
spammy.  That effectively serves the same purpose but doesn't have the bad
property of blacklists or whitelists - that they ignore everything else the
software is trying to tell you about the content of the message.

Skip



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