[Mimedefang] [Slightly OT]: Q about Rejecting based on charset

Dirk the Daring dirk at psicorps.org
Mon Jun 27 13:35:15 EDT 2005


>From: "James Ebright" <jebright at esisnet.com>

>>    If he knows for a fact that he wants to reject those emails
>> outright, then rejecting them in filter() and avoiding a call to SA
>> is the more prudent choice.
>
>Well, while true it would be more efficient, I would not call it more prudent,
>to me allowing the end user the choice to decide what is and is not spam when
>the only positive hit might be the charset is more prudent, you can easily
>allow for that in SA. Basically you loose the flexibility SA allows for a bit
>more efficiency (probably a moot amount unless you are slammed with these
>types of messages). But, as you pointed out, it is his call.

   I have weathered amazing, tho brief, storms of SPAM. I agree that
universally rejecting based on the 6 final charsets (I eliminated the
"windows_125x" sets from my list) does lose some of the flexibility of
SA, but like I said, in my 10 year mail archive, none of those
6 character sets were associated with HAM.

   My analysis of my individual situation (vis-a-vis the services I
provide to the population I support) is that rejecting E-Mail using
those character sets is a reasonable balance against imposing my SPAM
rules on the user population and efficiently distributing my resources.

>Also, Dirk, if you have a spam corpus of 10 years then you need to read the
>thread about prior art and some recent patent debates, your information may be
>usefull... [or were you exagerating a tad ;-) ]

   Got a link?

   Actually, I confess that my SPAM corpus is not that old. Probably
only 2 years, 3 at most, and then much of that resides on backup media
as opposed to online.

   My HAM corpus does indeed go back 10 years. I confess to being an
E-Mail packrat.

Dirk



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