Some Tips on Avoiding False Positives, For Senders

Tip: examine exactly which rules were triggered. 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's 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 the filter.

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

Tip: check out Habeas ( http://www.habeas.com/ ). They use a trademarked, patented piece of text, with restrictive licensing terms that forbid its use in spam. (Is it really patented ? I think it has a copyright and a trademark, but not a patent). They've also committed to suing spammers who attempt to subvert this model. 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. (*Please* report spammers who illegally use the Habeas haiku.)

Some useful links:

• Frugal Marketing: That's not Spam, That's My Newsletter! http://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/notspamnews.shtml
• SpamCon Foundation: Best practices for marketers: http://www.spamcon.org/directories/best-practices.shtml
• Bulk e-mail HOWTO: http://spam.abuse.net/marketerhelp/bulk-howto.shtml
  

Other organizations we give "bonus points":

HashCash http://hashcash.org/
which refers back to SpamAssassin in some of their documentation ( http://hashcash.org/faq.html http://hashcash.org/draft-hashcash.txt
). This is a technological solution, while Habeas is a social/legal solution.

(EditHint: what other organizations does Spam Assassin give bonus points to ? The Spam Assassin mailing lists ?)