Steve Dondley <s@dondley.com> writes:
> I'm learning a bit about spamassassin rules and taking a peek at how
> my inbound mail is scored. I noticed that PF_NONE scores zero points
> by default. I'm wondering if there is a good reason for not giving it
> a score and whether I should set that to something much higher like
> 1.0.
>
> I'm curious to know what more experienced people have this set
> to. Thanks.
The meta point is that scores are normally set by examining a large
corpus of ham and spam. You are implicitly adopting a theory that
SPF_NONE is correlated with spamminess, but you have not validated that
theory.
Certainly if you have preferences you are welcome to set them in your
own system. I score up icky things like HTML-only mail, mail where the
text and html don't match, etc.. Basically when someone is doing things
that violate standards or best practice, I'm less interested in
reading it. However that is quite different from whether it is spam.
In my case, I tend not to request content that has these issues, and
thus *for me* mail that is nonconforming has a higher likelihood of
being spam than would be true for a mailbox operated by a normal person.
So, if when you get mail from your friends that is SPF_NONE, you hassle
them about it and ask them to add an SPF record, maybe SPF_NONE is a
clue of spam for your inbox.
I find only a small % of both my ham and spam has SPF_NONE. I therefore
don't think it has much predictive value.
