Tsunami warning emails hit by spam barrier
The first live run of the Indian Ocean Tsunami warning system earlier this month turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Not a natural disaster, but it provided an unexpected result for some users of Apache's SpamAssassin. Subscribers to the automated e-mail warning system, which sent out an alert for an earthquake off Northern Sumatra that rated 6.7 on the Richter scale, found the Tsunami warning notification deferred as spam.
The problem arises if the open source filter is installed straight out of the box; the messages (usually written in upper case) are not considered spam.
But for anyone who locks down the spam filter, SpamAssassin categorizes the e-mail as spam due to a combination of upper case text in a clear-cut format forwarded by a hidden sender.
With the spam filters locked down, the warning message - written in the original in upper case letters, of: "THERE IS A VERY SMALL POSSIBILITY OF A DESTRUCTIVE LOCAL TSUNAMI IN THE INDIAN OCEAN", rates a spam score of 3.7 out of 10.
