• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

IMagicLab Spam Assassin Score ??'s

DanMorgan

4 Pounder
Nov 13, 2009
76
2
Awards
4
First Name
Dan
So I just made an email template for myself in IML.

It's a quick email with 4 single lines of text with no links. All text but yet I still get this Spam Assassin Assesment report below.

Why is this? My main wonder focuses on the 2.4pt area that says "2.4 DNS_FROM_OPENWHOIS RBL: Envelope sender listed in bl.open-whois.org."




Spam Assassin Email Report




Your Spam Assassin Assessment score is: 5.2

Scores of 5 or higher are consider by many email servers as spam and are likely
to be filtered out so the recipient never sees them. If your score is above 5, we
recommend editing your template to lower the score and reduce the likelihood that
your emails will be considered as spam.

The following Spam Assassin Report details why your email received the score it did.
use this information to to lower your score.

(5.2 points, 5.0 required)

pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
2.4 DNS_FROM_OPENWHOIS RBL: Envelope sender listed in bl.open-whois.org.
0.0 MISSING_MID Missing Message-Id: header
-0.0 NO_RELAYS Informational: message was not relayed via SMTP
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
1.7 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
1.1 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag
-0.0 NO_RECEIVED Informational: message has no Received headers
 
These are the two reasons that cause that message on my server.

1) The originating server is actually on the RBL list, you can check it here:Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted
Don't be too worried if the server shows up on the "backscatter" or "callout" lists. It's not great to be there -but I don't think Spamassassin uses them.

2) The server running Spamassassin is not up to date (I think there was a bug in recent months).
Make sure the server you test with is 3.3.0 or later as most servers have at-least loaded that version to fix a date related bug.

If you need help with this - send one of your test emails to me at [email protected] and I'll see if I can help.
 
This could be from a number of reasons. But, the top 2 are:

1. The IP that IML is using has been listed in a Spam database. From the SA whitepaper "An RBL contains a list of IP addresses whose owners refuse to stop the proliferation of Spam from their servers. The RBL usually lists ISPs whose customers are responsible for Spam or email servers that are hijacked by spammers to send Spam."

2. You are receiving "false positives" due to a set-up and/or update of SA in the IML system. It might have to do with a cyber-squatting issue for the domain "open-whois.org" - I tried to find the exact whitepaper, but basically the domain is no longer used by SA because someone didn't renew it, and someone else got it. This was in 2008 or 2009 - hard to believe IML has not updated their system since then.

Hope this helps to point you in the right direction - or at least open a ticket with IML.
 
Wow thanks for the input guys. I'm going to get with IML to see what they think about the scores and if their SpamAssassin server is working correctly or not.

I was trying to see if we were on the Blacklist but I don't have the server info for the IML account. My website looks fine though.

Anyways, thanks again and I'll update here if I find out anything substantial :)
 
Dan, Cliff and Drew -

Thanks for your feedback on the spam assassin score in iMagicLab. We listened and just released a completely updated spam assessment tool. We wanted to make sure our dealers have the best technology possible to create email content so we now provide the score along with specific information related to images, text and links in the email that raise the score. I attached a screen shot of the new spam assessment tool for reference. Also note that you can now obtain a spam score without the need to save your email, just click on the refresh arrows as you type and the score is displayed instantly based on the current email content.

Keep the great ideas and comments coming!

Best,

Tom Harsha
 

Attachments

  • Spam Score Update.jpg
    Spam Score Update.jpg
    83.7 KB · Views: 17
Last edited: