Classifying bounced messages

[David Relson]

On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 15:11:06 -0700
Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com> wrote:

> David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 14:45:26 -0700
> > Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > I was just wondering, is it a good idea to classify bounced
> > > messages that are in your "unsure" category as spam?
> > > 
> > > With the recent sobig virus, lots of crap is mailed with my
> > > address used as the sender so I'm getting a lot of messages that
> > > are from Mailer-Daemon that include the virus.
> > > 
> > > Should I be classifying these messages as spam as I would if I
> > > received the virus directly, or by doing so, do I increase the
> > > chance that I might miss a legitimate Mailer-Daemon message?
> > 
> > Bill,
> > 
> > My vote is "classify as spam".  Remember that bogofilter looks for
> > "strong indicators of spam and ham".  The language of the bounce
> > messages is probably enough different from your ham that it makes
> > for good non-ham indicators.
> 
> Thanks. That's sort of my thinking too but I wasn't positive. I'd be
> curious to hear any dissenting views, if there are any.

So far as possible, I have my 419 scams and virii stored in separate
folders.  I keep thinking about building separate wordlists and letting
bogofilter take its best shot at spotting those bad boys.  Of course,
it'd mean running bogofilter 3 times for each incoming message, and
having separate config files (so as to have distinct "spam_subject_tags"
for my MUA to key on).  Given the low rate for incoming mail, it's
probably an experiment worth doing :-)