[imp] spamassassin and blocking lists

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Iain Pople <ip at brunny.com>:

> Hi,
>
> If I send an email from IMP the headers it inserts can cause problems
> with spamassassin and dialup blocking lists.
>
> e.g.
>
> Received: from CPE-203-45-11-59.vic.bigpond.net.au
> (CPE-203-45-11-59.vic.bigpond.net.au [203.45.11.59])
> 	by webmail.brunny.com (IMP) with HTTP
> 	for <iain at localhost>; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 10:21:07 +1000
>
> It is inserting a header with the IP address of the computer sending the
> email from IMP. The problem is that often this computer is on a dynamic
> IP or dialup connection so listed in various blocking lists. This
> results in triggering some of the spam assasin rules:
>
> X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.3 tagged_above=-99.0 required=5.5 tests=AWL,
> 	BAYES_00, HELO_DYNAMIC_DHCP, HELO_DYNAMIC_IPADDR, NO_REAL_NAME,
> 	RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL
>
> This has caused several legitimate messages to be tagged as spam.
>
> I notice that if i use a SMTP client instead (e.g. thunderbird), the
> headers are slightly different:
>
> Received: from cpe-203-45-11-59.vic.bigpond.net.au ([203.45.11.59]) by
> bwmam09.bigpond.com(MAM REL_3_4_2a 138/139363271) with SMTP id
> 139363271; Sun, 31 Oct 2004 14:35:01 +1000
>
> This doesn't trigger any spam assassing rules.
>
> Is this a peculiarity of IMP.? Is there some way i can avoid this happening?

Search the archives for a discussion of this previously.  Essentially, the
reason that IMP adds Received headers for the web browser->web server is that
it is consistent with what is expected/asked for in the RFCs.

And quite honestly spamassassin is pretty dumb (in my opinion) in 
assessing this
as a spam trigger (but then again, I think that blocking messages because they
appear on a so-called Dialup or Dynamic range - which, often times, are ranges
based on totally incorrect information - is about the stupidest thing 
you could
possibly do).

michael

_______________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at curecanti.org]