Bug 2534 - AWL applied to identified as spam messages
Summary: AWL applied to identified as spam messages
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Spamassassin
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Rules (show other bugs)
Version: SVN Trunk (Latest Devel Version)
Hardware: All All
: P5 enhancement
Target Milestone: Future
Assignee: SpamAssassin Developer Mailing List
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2003-09-30 23:09 UTC by Alexander Leschinsky
Modified: 2007-04-16 05:17 UTC (History)
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Description Alexander Leschinsky 2003-09-30 23:09:38 UTC 
huge amount of spam with same From produce noticeable AWL compensation (and can
"clean" spam), if recipient can't modify own prefs by adding "blacklist_from"
I think, appling AWL shifting _after_ calclulationg final score only for
non-spam messages can be reasonable add-on
Comment 1 Keith Ivey 2003-10-11 11:41:41 UTC 
One of the main reasons for AWL is to keep messages from regular correspondents
from being erroneously marked as spam.  When a friend sends you a joke about
Viagra that would pass the spam threshold, the score gets reduced because of the
friend's long-term average.  With your suggested change, that wouldn't happen.

Have you read the FAQ at
http://spamassassin.taint.org/faq/index.cgi?req=show&file=faq06.002.htp ?
Comment 2 Christian Becker 2004-08-12 16:08:06 UTC 
I just ran into this myself - the AWL scanning report is simply unclear and 
causes confusion.
The issue described pops up when you run multiple tests on the same/similar 
spam. Higher bayes scores, for example, will then cause your current score to 
be higher than the averaged mean score, which result in a negative adjustment 
(delta) for the mail being scanned.

Which will look like this in the report:
-1.9 AWL                    AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list

Leading anybody not clued into the deep mechanics of the AWL into 
thinking "hey i didn't whitelist those suckers did i?"
I suggest changing the report line to something like "AWL: From: Adjustment 
towards mean score" to limit confusion.
Comment 3 Justin Mason 2004-08-12 16:53:54 UTC 
actually, that's a *really* good point that we've missed...

All the way along, we've been referring to the AWL as an auto-whitelist; we've
been considering how to fix that, but renaming the rule etc. seems like a lot of
work as it's pretty pervasive.  We don't actually need to change anything except
for the rule description:

  -1.9 AWL                    AWL: sender historical score adjustment

would do it IMO.
Comment 4 Daniel Quinlan 2005-03-30 01:08:51 UTC 
move bug to Future milestone (previously set to Future -- I hope)
Comment 5 Justin Mason 2007-04-16 05:17:37 UTC 
this is a FAQ: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/AwlWrongWay