[MlMt] How is span score computed?

[Bill Cole]

On 2024-09-26 at 09:47:21 UTC-0400 (Thu, 26 Sep 2024 09:47:21 -0400)
William Allen <mailmate at lists.freron.com>
is rumored to have said:

> I subscribe to my local newspaper’s daily bulletin. Recently I 
> noticed I wasn’t getting it anymore and after looking a the junk 
> folder saw it had a spam score of 4.0. Just looking at the mailings I 
> can’t see any difference. Is there any way to understand what is 
> triggering a score for a particular piece of mail? Likewise, is there 
> a way to override the filter for a particular sender?

MailMate itself does not score messages. The scores it can detect are 
those determined either by SpamSieve locally or by your email provider's 
spam filters. Without knowing which is relevant in your case, it isn't 
possible to say how to adjust it. So if you have installed SpamSieve, 
consult its documentation for how to adjust its scoring. If you haven't 
installed SpamSieve, the score is being added by your mailbox provider 
and you should ask them what adjustments are available.

SOME (not all) mailbox providers claim that by removing the $Junk flag 
and/or adding a $NotJunk flag and/or moving mail from a "Junk" or "Spam" 
mailbox to the INBOX will be noticed by their filter maintenance systems 
and lead to future similar messages no0t being marked as spam. SOME also 
claim that if you add the sender to an address book linked to their mail 
system (such as Google, iCloud, or Exchange Online/MS365) it will 
prevent future mail from being labeled Spam.

[Puts on Apache SpamAssassin maintainer hat for the following tangent]

One of the most common free and open-source toolkits included by mail 
providers as a part of their spam filters is SpamAssassin, maintained by 
the Apache Software Foundation. Anyone can use SpamAssassin and modify 
it however they like. It is sometimes useful to use a SpamAssassin scan 
to figure out what may be considered spam by systems that use it *and* 
by other tools that use similar scanning approaches. If you're 
comfortable working with command line tools and understand how to setup 
a Perl runtime environment (probably with MacPorts or Homebrew) it can 
be useful to install SpamAssassin and use it to answer such questions as 
"why was this marked as spam?"

Unfortunately, the most easily findable website offering the general 
public SpamAssassin scans is miserably misconfigured and misleading. If 
you do find and use it or any similar tool online, you should understand 
that any spam filtering  requires site-specific information to work 
well, so public scanners are always going to make mistakes based on 
their lack of knowledge. I don't link to public scanners because they 
have that innate flaw, but some people find them helpful.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo at toad.social and many *@billmail.scconsult.com 
addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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