Regional Rules (was: [Bug 6378] [RFE] RIR based Regional Rules)

[Karsten Bräckelmann <gu...@rudersport.de>]

> https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6378
> Adam Katz <an...@khopis.com> changed:

>                    [...]  __RCVD_VIA_APNIC_LE and __RCVD_VIA_LACNIC_LE, both
> present as meta tests because it is dangerous to publish them as rules that can
> be assigned higher scores.
> 
> See http://ruleqa.spamassassin.org/?rule=/RCVD_VIA.*LE though note that the
> results are biased by the fact that the test corpora lack any notable quantity
> of non-spam from LACNIC and APNIC.

This raises a general question, potentially about SA project (and ASF?)
moral, ethics, and political correctness.

Do we want to have rules in stock SA, enabled by default, based on the
origin network, region, continent, language, ... you name it.


This just reminded of one of the two rules that are now in the 3.3.1
tarball, with no explicit score -- and thus a score of 1.0. Despite
John's clear intent, to test with a *low* score. Anyway, the currently
live rule in question, in John's own words:

 "What's odd is that there _is_ an explicit score on NSL_ORIG_FROM_41 in my
  sandbox. A _low_ score. 41/8 is all of Africa."

Note the last sentence. I'm with Adam here (and John's intention). I
don't feel particularly comfortable to have the GA decide about a score
for an entire continent. Or RIR. Even less so, since we don't have a
substantial ham corpus originating from all those regions.


Providing such rules as requested in bug 6378, *disabled* or almost
informational scoring by default -- one thing. It's on the admin's
discretion to enable them. But enabled by default, possibly with a high
score?

I realize this is a slippery slope. And there likely are some
discriminating rules or terminology in stock already.

However, AFAIR similar stuff usually is disabled by default. Or
permissive. Like ok_locales, ok_languages, the TextCat plugin...

  guenther


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0.@ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}

Re: Regional Rules (was: [Bug 6378] [RFE] RIR based Regional Rules)

[John Hardin <jh...@impsec.org>]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Karsten Br�ckelmann wrote:

> This just reminded of one of the two rules that are now in the 3.3.1
> tarball, with no explicit score -- and thus a score of 1.0. Despite
> John's clear intent, to test with a *low* score. Anyway, the currently
> live rule in question, in John's own words:
>
> "What's odd is that there _is_ an explicit score on NSL_ORIG_FROM_41 in my
>  sandbox. A _low_ score. 41/8 is all of Africa."

_hopefully_ that will go away the first time they run sa_update...

-- 
  John Hardin KA7OHZ                    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
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