Spam Spotlight on Reputation

[Bill Stewart]

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At 05:33 AM 9/13/2004, Ben Laurie wrote:
>Bill Stewart wrote:
>>I find it more annoying that there are spammers putting PGP headers
>>in their messages, knowing that most people who use PGP assume PGP-signed 
>>mail
>>is from somebody genuine and whitelist it.
>
>Surely you should check that:
>a) The signature works
>b) Is someone in your list of good keys
>before whitelisting?

My terminology was a bit sloppy, but until recently,
you could use the presence of PGP format indicators
as a whitelist entry, or at least a SpamAssassin good weight -
spammers didn't use the stuff, and the worst would be
quasi-spam like Yet Another Invitation
to some crypto-industry marketroid's seminar.

It might be a rant from Detweiler or some other
cypherpunk that you bozofilter, but at least that was a job
for your email program to sort out, not your first-tier spamfilter.

Besides, with most email clients, you can't check the
PGP information without opening the email
(more obviously true for PGP encrypted mail than signed mail),
so the email filters just go for basic syntax.


Bill Stewart  bill.stewart at pobox.com

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