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Ask HN: Antispam rules on email source code

4 points by jostino ↗ HN
I have a question about printing or not the antispam rules inside the cource code. I know that google doesn't print it inside the source code, I think it's done to avoid spammers to learn how avoid the antispam, etc. It's that a thing? I mean, what's the reason to put clearly the rules inside the source code of an email? When you have them inside your mail server's log I think it's enough. Am I wrong? What's your opinion about this?

Thanks!

3 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] thread
LinuxBender
When you say source do you mean in the email headers? Spam scores should always be in the email headers. There are some scripts [1] out there that try to reverse engineer all the spam scores but they are not perfect. Google has a tool specific to GMail. [2] To my knowledge very few mail providers hide this information but it can seem obfuscated as each provider may have their own proprietary in-house tools.

[1] - https://github.com/mgeeky/decode-spam-headers

[2] - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/29436?hl=en

jostino
Yep, sorry, it was the email headers. Anyway, thanks for this useful information, in particular that GitHub tool it's pretty interesting!
detaro
The reason is pretty obvious: so the end user can filter spam based on it and see why something was flagged.