A local low-budget hosting company is using DirectAdmin and has configured their mailservers so all outgoing mail is scanned for spam. My guess is that they grew tired of getting their IP's removed from blacklists, because they were notorious for having blacklisted IP's.
Anyway, I have very little knowledge of the way this is set up, but they add this header to all outgoing (over SMTP) messages:
Does look familiar to anyone using SpamAssassin, doesn't it? Note that the template for this message wasn't changed, and it even says "incoming" instead of outgoing.
Now for my question: besides adding a lot of extra headers, the "X-Spam-Report" header can cause problems on systems running a service called "AMaViS" (A Mail Virus Scanner). Probably because of the "Content Preview", some AMaViS installs bark at this header:
From this conversation I gather that newer RFC's indeed prohibit whitespace (I assume empty lines), and thus a strictly configured AMaViS installation can bounce these messages. Users are seeing their messages being bounced and there's not a lot they can do. In your opinion, who's to blame here? Scanning outgoing mail for spam is obviously a good thing if you have a questionable client base, but adding lots of headers, and even a message preview (which can easily contain empty lines) cannot be right, or is it?
Anyway, I have very little knowledge of the way this is set up, but they add this header to all outgoing (over SMTP) messages:
Code:
X-Spam-Report: Spam detection software, running on the system "servername-here",
has NOT identified this [B]incoming[/B] email as spam. The original
message has been attached to this so you can view it or label
similar future email. If you have any questions, see
the administrator of that system for details.
Content preview: Msg body here. [...]
Content analysis details: (0.0 points, 5.0 required)
pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
Does look familiar to anyone using SpamAssassin, doesn't it? Note that the template for this message wasn't changed, and it even says "incoming" instead of outgoing.
Now for my question: besides adding a lot of extra headers, the "X-Spam-Report" header can cause problems on systems running a service called "AMaViS" (A Mail Virus Scanner). Probably because of the "Content Preview", some AMaViS installs bark at this header:
Code:
INVALID HEADER
Improper folded header field made up entirely of whitespace (char 20 hex):
X-Spam-Report: ...that system for details. Content previ[...]
From this conversation I gather that newer RFC's indeed prohibit whitespace (I assume empty lines), and thus a strictly configured AMaViS installation can bounce these messages. Users are seeing their messages being bounced and there's not a lot they can do. In your opinion, who's to blame here? Scanning outgoing mail for spam is obviously a good thing if you have a questionable client base, but adding lots of headers, and even a message preview (which can easily contain empty lines) cannot be right, or is it?