possible wish list item

[Craig Jackson <cj...@localsurface.com>]

Regarding the report that is made part of the header, instead of a 
summary of the email (which makes downloading tiresomely long even on a 
high speed connection), I would like to see only the text that tripped 
each particular test. Users often want to know what exactly in the email 
caused it to be tagged as spam. It would be nice if I could show them in 
the header at the workstation, rather than run a test from my 
workstation and print it out. If this can already be done, let me know 
and I'll figure out how to do it.
Thanks,
Craig Jackson

Re: possible wish list item

[Matt Kettler <mk...@evi-inc.com>]

Craig Jackson wrote:
> Regarding the report that is made part of the header, instead of a
> summary of the email (which makes downloading tiresomely long even on a
> high speed connection), I would like to see only the text that tripped
> each particular test. Users often want to know what exactly in the email
> caused it to be tagged as spam. It would be nice if I could show them in
> the header at the workstation, rather than run a test from my
> workstation and print it out. If this can already be done, let me know
> and I'll figure out how to do it.


Currently, that's pretty much impossible to do in spamassassin, and it would be
difficult to do without increasing memory usage.

Right now, SA just maintains a simple hit list when it scans a message. It
doesn't extract the text which matched at all, much less save it where it can be
referenced later.

Quoting the part of the email that caused the rule to trip is particularly
difficult for eval tests, as their code could look at anything or everything.

It's also a little tricky for meta tests which wind up triggering as a cascade
of other rules trip off. (ie: DRUGS_MANYKINDS).

I'd also question who would find such a feature more useful, end users or spammers.

Certainly it has some valid uses for end users and non-spammers, but it's
considerably more useful to a spammer. For end users it answers the "why did
this happen" questions, for spammers it provides useful spam-tuning feedback
that makes their spam more effective at evading detection by SA.