SpamAssassin's header lines

[Mark M. Hoffman]

* David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> [2002-10-07 14:46:40 -0400]:
> At 02:29 PM 10/7/02, Matthias Andree wrote:
> >On Mon, 07 Oct 2002, Ben Rosengart wrote:
> >
> > > > should get rid of all those headers and maybe have an optional parameter
> > > > allowing us to get rid of the "{SPAM?}" string in the subject line so
> > > > they do not interfere with bogofilter's detection.
> > >
> > > What do you mean, "interfere"?  This is valid input!
> >
> >Well, it is what another tool has made of it, and as such, how good is
> >that? SpamAssassin pulls several characteristics from the mail and
> >emphasizes them by adding more tokens for them. Does this not spoil our
> >weighting?
> 
> Any tokens added by SpamAssassin will get thrown into the spamicity 
> calculation.  Of course they will have to be "interesting" enough.  Even 
> then, there will be other tokens used in the calculation.  I think it 
> unlikely that "X-SpamAssassin-says-its-spam" will common enough to have a 
> noticeable effect.

What we need is to allow the user to specify which headers to ignore.  Tokens
added by SA or whatever may be considered useful by some, not by others.  There's
no question they're an external bias to the system... depends on whether or not
you think that's good.

Since I've already proposed major lexer changes, I will take this on also.  I
suppose the list of headers to ignore will be spec'ed in the RC/ini file that
Eric S. is working?  Any other ideas... let me know.

Regards,

-- 
Mark M. Hoffman
mhoffman at lightlink.com