Habeas thought they had a clever idea:
copyright a little
haiku, consider any mail that has the haiku to be not spam, then
sue any spammer who violates their copyright.
What a dumb idea! The problem is spamassassin treats this mark as strong evidence of not-spam (-8.0: +5.0 required to be spam). So of course a bunch of spammers are including it to slip past spam filters. My carefully tuned spam filters started failing recently because of this. Sure, some day maybe a copyright lawsuit will bring some relief, but that's years away. I'm not the only one with this problem: Anders Jacobsen, no such weblog, truerwords, uncle dirtae, etc. The problem is that spam is an arms race: as soon as the spam filters impolement a technique the spammers find an exploit. 'Test for this magic string' is awfully easy to exploit. Solution? score HABEAS_SWE 0.0.
Update 2004-03-15: a
spamassassin developer
contacted me. They are working on a fix that sounds good.
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