Back in August, I noted what spam filters I have set up myself using Eudora. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that some messages I'm receiving have been showing up with "*****SPAM***** " inserted in the subject line. It seems that my ISP, AOL Time Warner's Road Runner service, has started using SpamAssassin to filter my email at the server level.

The big liablity of server-side filtering is the threat of false positives -- i.e., those messages identified as spam that are in fact legit messages. SpamAssassin has a clever response to that, namely inserting the SPAM warning in the subject line instead of simply deleting the messages undelivered.

The system does seem to generate a fair number of false positives, nonetheless. I've taken to watching with amusement which messages trip its triggers. In particulary @d:tech can't seem to catch a break. About half of all the messages they've been sending me in recent weeks get flagged as spam by the system.

In the interest of helping the rest of you stay on the right side of this filter, here are the keywords that are catching the filter's attention, according to a report that gets inserted at the top of every suspect message (note: I think that individual ISPs can write their own keyword filters, so this may not reflect all uses of SpamAssassin).

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