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Wednesday, April 28, 2004
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 Wednesday, April 28, 2004
started 4/28/2004; 4:40:56 AM - last post 4/30/2004; 7:20:24 AM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, April 28, 2004 
4/28/2004; 8:40:56 AM (reads: 5266, responses: 4)
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Are (or Eire) you sure he's not here? 
| | Speaking of which, how about a get-together here? Anybody up for that? (I am, like, not organized, as you can tell.) |
KOAF!
We can ass-check your facts, too
| | Compare that to the photo of John Kerry, clad in a suit, on the left (oh! I just noticed that one!). I told myself that, yes, it's biased, but, and this is where I give them credit, it's true. In 1971, Kerry was already out of the service, and Bush was nominally serving his country. |
Black chopper notification
Worker be
| | Here's the challenge: what can I write about without giving away the store from my customers' points of view? I have two ideas.. |
| | By the way, Frank is the first IT mechanic (trust me, I don't qualify... I just run the place), to start plying his craft at IT Garage. |
Assisting an assassin
| | I have a friend whose mail always gets flagged as spam because... well, I'll let SpamAssassin tell you: |
| | This mail is probably spam....Content preview: Content analysis details: (7.70 points, 5 required)
HTML_FONT_FACE_ODD (0.3 points) BODY: HTML font face is not a commonly used face
HTML_FONT_BIG_B (0.5 points) BODY: HTML has a big "font" and "B" tag combo
HTML_50_60 (0.5 points) BODY: Message is 50% to 60% HTML
HTML_MESSAGE (0.1 points) BODY: HTML included in message
HTML_FONT_BIG (0.3 points) BODY: FONT Size +2 and up or 3 and up
HTML_FONT_COLOR_BLUE (0.1 points) BODY: HTML font color is blue
HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_08 (0.7 points) BODY: HTML has images with 600-800 bytes of words
SUBJ_ALL_CAPS (1.1 points) Subject is all capitals
FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK (3.5 points) Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook
MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME (0.6 points) Message looks like Outlook, but isn't The original message did not contain plain text, and may be unsafe to open with some email clients; in particular, it may contain a virus, or confirm that your address can receive spam. If you wish to view it, it may be safer to save it to a file and open it with an editor. |
| | He's using generic Outlook on XP, he believes. What should I (or we) tell him to do? His business requires sticking with Windows and Outlook, so snarky entreaties to ditch either won't be useful. |
NEAT stuff
| | We got up early for two reasons Monday morning: 1) so I could catch a bus to LAX to catch a plane I thought was at 10:55am but turned out to be at 5:50pm; and 2) to see Comet Bradfield. Conditions in the sky turned out to be just as hazy as those in my mind, so we were 0 for 2. |
| | Back when I was in Top 40 radio, there was still an art to "smacking a lyric" by talking over the instrumental intro to a song. I've just done that for the latest post by Michael Taht, who has much more to say about most of the above. Hit it, Mike. |
discuss
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Grant - Re: Assisting an assassin
4/28/2004; 9:50:03 AM (reads: 574, responses: 0)
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The easiest thing to do would be to encode the email in plain text. Sure, he wouldn't be able to do all the bold and colors and big fonts, but also his emails won't be flagged as spam. It's a tradeoff I suppose.
To change this you must go to Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Compose in this message format: Plain Text.
Of course, that only gets us part way there. Taking out all the points for HTML stuff, you are still left with the 1.1 for all caps in the subject, 3.5 for "Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook" and .6 for "Message looks like Outlook, but isn't" which all still adds up to more than 5.
To get the score below five all your friend must do is not put his subjects in caps. But that still leaves that 4.1 points that I don't understand at all. Hopefully somebody else will be able to take it from there, but at least this way SpamAssassin won't flag the emails as spam.
discuss
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Lon Baker - Re: Assisting an assassin
4/28/2004; 11:32:40 AM (reads: 567, responses: 0)
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In addition to the previous suggestion of changing from html to plain text e-mail format.
You can train SA that your friends e-mail is not spam but ham instead, as well as enable auto-whitelisting to help with this problem.
To teach SA an email is no spam you can:
sa-learn --showdots --ham --dir directory
The directory can contain messages you know are not spam. This will teach the SA bayes filter. You can also reverse this process to teach it spam that gets through SA. SA is smart enough to know about its own tags so you do not have to strip them before training SA in this manner.
The auto-whitelisting is a feature which adds counter weight to known good sources as they successfully send message to you. If an e-mail from a good source happens to breach the SA score it will be adjusted based on the built up whitelist score.
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Rob Schneider - Re: Wednesday, April 28, 2004
4/28/2004; 1:18:04 PM (reads: 589, responses: 1)
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Your friend is sending mail in HTML format and is doing way too much formatting. This formatting is either deliberately applied or controlled by the template (see below--my hunch is Word is the editor).
To completely avoid, use "plain text". There are no special settings in Outlook which create complicated HTML. Unless absolutely required (to communicate as opposed to impress), your friend should avoid using HTML formatted mail.
I suspect your friend is using Word as the Editor for making this mail. Just a hunch. Word and Outlook are pretty good together as a tool for writing. I use this combination all the time. My hunch is that your friend's normal.dot template (on which the email document is based, has got complex formatting, and you friend is a lot of different styles, or hand-coding these complex formats ... and SpamAssassin is detecting it.
Unless your friend is required to keep normal.dot, just delete it and start afresh. (Word re-creates it on next startup.) Or have your friend find out what template is being used if not normal.dot.
If your friend wishes to pursue this, your friend can get more advice from Microsoft's newsgroup on Outlook by asking questions about how HTML is format is controlled when using Word as the Editor and composing mail in Outlook.
Finally I was curious about the last two SpamAssassin tests. I looked at http://www.spamassassin.org/tests.html which list all the standard tests. I can't find the tests entitled: FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK and MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME. Where did they come from? I used Google to search for these two rules and got lots of hits. I don't know enough about SpamAssassin to really understand the results. Since these seem to be non-standard rules, I'm wondering how they could be so widely distributed so that your friend's mail is "always" detected as spam by SpamAssassin. Something doesn't seem right here--just a hunch.
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Rob Schneider - Re: Wednesday, April 28, 2004
4/30/2004; 11:20:24 AM (reads: 622, responses: 0)
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To complete the thread, someone emailed with info on the Spamassassin rules:
"Old(er) versions of Spamassassin used to have lots of rules regarding things like email user agent strings. The spammers realised that these could be used to make a mail look *more* legitimate and thus those rules have been abandoned in spamassassin's greater than 2.55 (thus the reason they arren't on the web)..."
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