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Re: Are you spam?



On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 09:05:44PM -0500, alex wrote:
| I monitor several Linux forums and have noticed that Debian mail far 
| outnumbers the mail on other Linux forums.
| I  also notice that, percentagewise, more Debian mail is blocked by my 
| ISP's  SPAM blocker (Postini)
| than any other and if  does get through, some of it appears as general 
| mail  instead of in the Debian mailbox.
| 
| I'm sure that if this happening to me, it must be happening to others..

It's not happening to me.

| I believe that the reason is the way the mail is addressed.....The
| problem arises when multiple addresses are used.
| If the mail has multiple addressees with debian-user@lists.debian.org 
| being a 2nd or 3rd CC instead of  To or the
| first CC,  this may cause the mail to not fit the profile that an ISP's 
| SPAM blocker uses to determine if a message is
| to be allowed to pass.  

That is not a very good heuristic, IMO.  Spamassassin doesn't flag
ordinary messages (except for a certain person who has "charset=Big5"
instead of "charset=us-ascii" in their headers).

| If  an ISP doesn't use a SPAM blocker service, the message  passes but 
| then a filter that directs the mail to a Debian
| mailbox may instead treat it as general mail, depending on how the 
| filter is profiled.for Debian mail.

Use the X-Mailing-List header!  It isn't wrong.
>From your message :
    X-Mailing-List: <debian-user@lists.debian.org> archive/latest/192891

| What's wrong with addressing  debian-user@lists.debian.org  with To 
| instead of burying it in a multitude of CCs?

The way some mailers handle "Reply To All".  The "From:" header is
probably what gets put in the "To:" field and the list is stuck
somewhere in the Cc: list.  There is no precedence for Cc: addresses,
so the mailer wouldn't care whether the list was number 1, 2, or n.
In fact, if the mailer lacks a "list-reply" feature, then it wouldn't
even know one of the addresses was a list!

-D

-- 

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to
look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from
being polluted by the world.
        James 1:27



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