News You Can Bruise for 2002 August 2 (entry 1)

Fri Aug 02 2002 13:37: Some of the descriptions of SpamAssassin tests are pretty funny.

• How dear can you be if you don't know my name?
• Claims not to be selling anything
• Says "We strongly oppose the use of SPAM email"
• Attempt at obfuscating the word "mortgage"
• Apparently, you'll be amazed
• Don't delete me! Nooooo!!!!
• People just leave money laying around
• Possible porn - Large Number of movies, pics
• And many more! When you order download SpamAssassin!

This reminds me to announce the second Crummy.com Spam Contest (the first one is over, but I haven't collated the results yet).

The premise of the contest is that SpamAssassin has finally given us an objective (though imperfect) way of measuring the "spamminess" of any given email. The object of the contest is to recieve the single most spammy email (as adjucated by SpamAssassin). Forward your entries to spammy-spam-contest@crummy.com, and wait forever for me to decide the contest is over and judge the results.

I don't use SA on my personal account yet, but we use it at work and there (for an account that gets little spam) I've seen spams with SA scores of 23, so I'd say about 25 is the bare minimum for getting excited enough about your spam to enter it. Honorable mention will be given to the spammiest email not to actually be spam or a discussion of spam.

As always with Crummy.com Spam Contests, this is to be a passive competition, like a rubber ducky race. You may not write spam that scores high on the SpamAssassin scale just so you can use it in this contest, nor may you alter the SpamAssassin rules, or add new ones, to make a particular piece of email score higher. You could spread around your email address in order to get more spam, but that act carries with it its own punishment.