[Spambayes] RE: Eliminating many malformed spams

[Barry Warsaw]

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 13:47, Steve Holden wrote:
> [Barry]
> > If that was truly the case, and we could count on proper RFC
> > compliance
> > by all legitimate mailing systems, then you could just throw all
> > non-parseable message into the spam folder and be done with it, right?
> >
> Yes, and I've even considered doing that, but I'm reluctant to trust
> that all legitimate mailers will be RFC-compliant. I'm also reluctant to
> draw conclusions from any particular characteristics of the
> malformation - once you start doing that, spammers will start using it
> as a way to misinform your filtering process.

Yeah, but here's the beauty of it - if you start throwing malformed
messages in the trash, or better yet, rejecting them at SMTP time, you
will accomplish two goals.  You'll provide a great incentive to
legitimate senders to start making sure their messages are properly
formed and you'll be building an incentive against spammers.  Spammers
can't abuse malformedness to get past your filters because they'll just
get rejected at smtp time -- the better for all your users.  They'll be
forced to at the very least properly format their messages just to get
them past the gatekeeper.

Please shoot holes in this, 'cause I'm liking this more and more :)

-Barry