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Some Tips

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for Legitimate Senders to Avoid False Positives

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Tip: use normal conversational English, be sure not to use excessive spacing and or capitalization on your subject (as this will be scanned too!)

Tip: examine exactly which rules were triggered if a message was marked as spam or nearly marked as spam. Take careful note of the points listed beside each rule name – low-scoring rules do not make much of a difference, it's the ones with high scores that need to be avoided.

Tip: if there are hits in the body of your mail-out, try rephrasing those sentences. We find that spam often uses exactly the same phrases, over and over again, so we detect specific lines of text, and in most cases, synonyms are ignored.Tip: don't use similar techniques that spammers use to disguise key words, like spacing out the letters or placing punctuation in odd places in the words. The statistics for use of these techniques show that it occurs far more frequently in spam mails.

Tip: if a subscriber reports that SpamAssassin is blocking mails they want, and they did not ask their ISP to set it up – get them to ask the ISP to take them off the filtering list! To be honest, sometimes we're as annoyed as you are about this. Spam filters should not be installed on an account unless the person wants it there, in our opinion, since even nowadays some people don't get as much spam as others. As a result, we ask ISPs to let the users opt in to using enable or disable the filter.

Tip: don't use 'bulk-mailing' tools used by spammers (iei.e., advertised in spam mails). These are overwhelmingly used to send spam, so we block those signatures as soon as we can SpamAssassin blocks mail sent by those tools as soon as possible

Tip: there are several whitelisting services which lower scores for sites using SpamAssassin network tests:

  • Bonded Sender ( http://www.bondedsender.org/ )
    Originators of legitimate email can now post a financial bond to ensure the integrity of their email campaign. Receivers who
    feel they have received an unsolicited email from a Bonded Sender can complain to their ISP, enterprise, or IronPort and a
    financial charge is debited from the bond.
  • Wiki Markup

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  • Habeas ( http://www.habeas.com/ ).
       They use a copyrighted piece of text

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  •  that 

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  • has restrictive licensing terms that forbid its use in spam combined with
       a DNS whitelist.  They

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  •  

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  • have committed to 

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  • sue spammers who 

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  • violate the 

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  • Habeas 

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  • license.
     

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  •  

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  •  Given that, as a result, we can count on mails with this token being non-spam\[\*\], we're happy to give it "bonus points" and
       allow it through filters.

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  • 
    \\

*Please \* report spammers who illegally use the Habeas haiku -- see http://www.habeas.com/report/ .)report any spam that is given bonus points for either of these services to the respective service.

Some useful links:

Other organizations we give methods for receiving "bonus points":

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  • This is a technological solution, while Bonded Sender is an economic solution and Habeas is a

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  • legal solution.