Re: Clearly bogus false positives -- on "abuse" contact point, no less Philip Prindeville wrote:
> Matt Kettler wrote:
>> Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>> Matt Kettler wrote:
>>>> Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>>>>>  
>>>>>
>>>>> Depends on whether you equate bare domains with URL's, I suppose.
>>>> If MUA's equate them with URLs, spammers will use this, and 
>>>> SpamAssassin will use it.
>>>
>>> There is only so much braindeath in UA's that you can bend the rules 
>>> for.  Clearly, this involves breaking them.
>> Erm.. What rule does this actually break? Is there a rule in an RFC 
>> somewhere specifying you MUST not interpret bare domains as URIs in 
>> text emails?
>
> There is an RFC that defines what a URL looks like.  A bare domain 
> doesn't cut it.
Yes, but there's nowhere that says you can't interpret any text you want 
as a URL.

RFCs in general are interpreted with "be strict about what you generate, 
and liberal with what you accept". URLizing text segments fits with that 
spirit, and it does not violate the letter of any RFC I'm aware of.

If you can prove otherwise, please do so.

> You want to forbid bare domains in email?  Go ahead.  You can forbid 
> anything you like.
>
> But don't call it a test for URL's, since it's clearly not.
Well, they don't.. they call it a test for URIs, which is actually 
slightly different, but not really to the point here.

However, in general, it is intended to be a "test for anything most 
MUA's will interpret as a URI".


>>
>> Besides, when this "braindeath" is more the norm than the exception, 
>> it's a de facto standard. Particularly in the absence of any rules 
>> against it.
>
> Yeah, I'll talk to the Outlook folks, and file a bug against 
> Thunderbird... (I think the latter only does it to be compatible with 
> the former...)
I'd venture to guess neither started it. Eudora predates both products 
by quite an extensive period of time. It could have originated there, or 
in Netscape mail.

Sorry, but I highly doubt you can blame this on microsoftism, nor do I 
think it's any kind of wild incorrectness as you so strongly postulate. 
This has been a very standard feature in email for a very long time. 
It's not a recent development.

It's also a feature that is quite important to accuracy in spamassassin. 
Spammers regularly take advantage of MUA's urlizing text. Regularly.. 
Every day. Adding the ability to detect those domains increases SA's hit 
rate for spam, and that's a good thing. Yes, it causes SA to trigger on 
spam reports, but it generally will do that for other parts of spam 
messages anyway.

Let's face it, your problem isn't with SA detecting a spam domain, it's 
with some idiot filter/rejecting their abuse box.


