Re: A Question

[Xander Jansen <]

Piet,

In your message of Tue, 17 Feb 1998 13:44:57 +0100 you wrote:
+     	- header-from address identical to header-to address
+     	  (incidentally, I've had 2 cases where a 'vacation'
+     	  message was seen as spam, because the remote user
+     	  had pre-filled the To: line with his own address);
+     Some system administrators might want to include an
+     exception to this rule, i.e. only filter this when
+     the domain-part is not 'local'
+ You missed my point: what I described is not a
+ *central* mail filter, but a *personalised* one.

I meant sysadmins as a person (yes, that's possible ;-) with personalised 
filters, not sysadmins managing an MTA.

+     	- space or tab in localpart;
+     Aha, the space-rule could filter out legal mail coming from
+     for example X.400 systems ;-).
+ Good! :-)

I somehow knew you would say that ;-)

+     Personally I have my problems with header/content based
+     filtering. Although probably effective in discarding spam
+     there is also a fair chance that such filters mark perfectly
+     valid mail as 'unwanted'.
+ Again: this header/content based filtering is
+ done by *my* personal filter. People here are
+ free to set up their own filter or to use no
+ filter at all.

That is exactly my point (I also was only talking about personal filters), 
one should feel free to do so but be aware of the risks. And the last part 
is sometimes missing. I frequently see people using rules that (at our site 
at least) would throw away lots of important mail. If mail is not the main 
means of communicating with your contacts/customers/.... than that's 
probably a risk one could take but when mail is crucial to your business 
the risks become very important and just can't be ignored.

Xander