Re: ASRG/Filtering List Launch: "Let the games begin!"

John Graham-Cumming wrote:

> Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
> 
>> 1. A standard header to be produced by the filters that can be used by 
>> the end-user's MUA. Having a standard header may reduce the complexity 
>> that the user needs to go through when configuring his MUA to parse 
>> filtering results.
> 
> 
> A good starting point might be to review the headers that current 
> implementations are inserting to understand the intent of each header 
> and how it is used.

Here is a note I got from one of the SpamAssasin people on the subject:

My main concerns:

  - making sure most MUAs out there can filter on the set of headers
  - the format not sucking :-)

For reference, SpamAssassin includes four headers to cover most of the 
bases:

1. X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=22.1 required=7.5 (and other keyword=value 
pairs)

    Can parse on string "X-Spam-Status", regexp using header and hits, etc.

2. X-Spam-Flag: YES

    Included for spam, header is left out for ham, so clients can just
    filter on existence of header.

3. X-Spam-Level: **********************

    Might be hard to allow this concept portably, but this allows tuning
    of the hit sensitivity level for MUAs that can't do regular
    expressions.  22 stars = 22 points.

4. X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.31 (devel $Id: 
SpamAssassin.pm,v 1.94.2.2 2002/06/20 17:20:29 hughescr Exp $)

    Always included for debugging, technical support, etc.

Off the top of my head, something like this could work for what you want:

   Text-Classification: class=spam certainty=99.99 
traits=VENDOR_SPECIFIC_FLAG1,VENDOR_SPECIFIC_FLAG2
   Text-Class-Spam: yes

Since this would be new functionality for most MUAs and would eventually
become part of most MUAs, just using the Text-Classification (or
whatever the name) header might be the way to go.

Predefined classes: ham, spam.

Certainty: maybe specify from 0 to 1 instead of 0 to 100

It might be necessary to attach certainties to other keyword=value
pairs (for example, it might be useful to have a language=en field in
the header).

Yakov

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Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"And this too shall come to pass"
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