[TriLUG] Base64 e-mail and Spamfilters

[Tanner Lovelace]

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Tom Boucher wrote:
|
| On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 11:28 AM, Roberto J Dohnert wrote:
|
| I have a totally different question.  Why when I view the raw text is
| your email encoded yet the text shows up in may Mac OS X Mail program
| fine?  The reason I ask is my spam filters tagged it and wouldn't let it
| through until I released it (spamcop)
|

Apparently his message was encoded in base64 (but still text/plain).
Some spam filters (SpamAssassin) can detect base64 and do its
examinations on the actual decoded text.  For instance, this is what
SpamAssasin told me about the message:

X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.5 required=5.0 tests=FREE_TRIAL autolearn=no

It appears some others, like spamcop, don't decode the base64 and
instead treat it as binary data and as a result think it's spam.

You might look into whether or not spamcop supports base64 and if
it requires a special option to be enabled.

Cheers,
Tanner
- --
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace(at)wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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