Habeas headers

>[OK, here's the deal. At the end of the year, a reader alerted me to
>the fact that Habeas is now de-emphasizing the haiku headers, and
>pointed me to a support discussion on their site. I think I see what
>they're doing now, but taking advantage of it will require some
>back-and-forth, since we have a comp account set up for me by a
>previous CEO ages ago, and I doubt the current people have any idea
>who we are. I was fiddling with TidBITS Talk settings for other
>reasons on Tuesday, so I decided to remove the haiku headers while I
>was there; clearly I need to wait and learn more and get things set
>up with the new system, if we're going to use it. So, the headers
>are back for now. If anyone here has current experience with Habeas,
>I'd be interested in hearing about it. -Adam]

I've looked into this situation more, and talked with Habeas. Since
their new system costs $10,000 for one domain and one IP address, I
couldn't restrain hysterical laughter, and the sales rep who called
me agreed that there wasn't really any reason for her to show me the
features.

Therefore, I'll be removing the Habeas haiku from all headers; if
you're using it for any filtering, I encourage you to stop, since
it's no longer considered useful and may in fact be detrimental to
delivery (since it is easily forged, and I guess Habeas gave up on
the concept of suing infringers).

cheers... -Adam

--
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS Publisher <http://www.tidbits.com/adam/>

On 1/17/07, Adam C. Engst <acetidbits.com> wrote:

> Therefore, I'll be removing the Habeas haiku from all headers; if
> you're using it for any filtering, I encourage you to stop, since
> it's no longer considered useful and may in fact be detrimental to
> delivery (since it is easily forged, and I guess Habeas gave up on
> the concept of suing infringers).

Yah, that concept largely departed with co-founder Anne Mitchell,
whose currently CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public
Policy (www.isipp.com). Without their big-gun attorney, suing
infringing spammers ceased being such a winning strategy. You really
need a top-tier anti-spam lawyer to pull it off, and they are in short
supply. Most of them are working full-time as outside legal counsel
to big ISPs like AOL or Earthlink.

 I've known Anne for years now, and ISIPP's database guy, Mickey
Chandler, is a former co-worker.

--Brian McNett
Network Analyst and Anti-Spam Guy
(Using Macs to Fight Spam)

Brian McNett wrote:
> On 1/17/07, Adam C. Engst <acetidbits.com> wrote:
>
>> Therefore, I'll be removing the Habeas haiku from all headers; if
>> you're using it for any filtering, I encourage you to stop, since
>> it's no longer considered useful and may in fact be detrimental to
>> delivery (since it is easily forged, and I guess Habeas gave up on
>> the concept of suing infringers).
>
> Yah, that concept largely departed with co-founder Anne Mitchell,
> whose currently CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public
> Policy (www.isipp.com). Without their big-gun attorney, suing
> infringing spammers ceased being such a winning strategy. You really
> need a top-tier anti-spam lawyer to pull it off, and they are in short
> supply. Most of them are working full-time as outside legal counsel
> to big ISPs like AOL or Earthlink.
>
Who were they going to sue. Most of the nasty SPAM is from areas with
suspect legal systems at best. Most of the spam I see the email servers
I control isn't from the US and what is is from "bots". Most of it just
this week is coming from Poland, Russia, and Mexico with China and Korea
slipping down near the bottom of the top 10. And the SPAM are mostly
links phishing sites in places like Bulgaria or Russia or virus
injection attempts from "bots".

Just who would they be suing? And even if they did sue here for things
done there, how do you collect from the Russia mob? I always wondered
about the concepts behind Habeas.

On 18-Jan-2007, at 06:31, David Ross wrote:
> Who were they going to sue.

Spam advertises a website and/or a product. You sue the owners of
that website/product.


[The recent penny stock spam is more designed to affect the price of a company whose stock can be manipulated for profit. Then there's a lot of spam designed purely to confuse spam filters. -Adam]


> Most of the nasty SPAM is from areas with suspect legal systems at
> best. Most of the spam I see the email servers I control isn't from
> the US and what is is from "bots".

Well, it is from bots, but the vast majority of spam I see on the
mail servers is, in fact, from the US. Well on 60% or so.

But, who to sue is a problem, and the Habeas experiment failed badly
(I had to very quickly move habeas headers from -5.00 to 0.00 and
then to +2.00 in my SpamAssassin. Now that TidBITS is no longer
using them, I'm going to check my mail spool and probably move the
score up to +5.00.

How about directions for removing the headers from the Mail.app?

I found I had to go into the $HOME/Library/Preferences/
com.apple.mail.plist and open it up with the Property List Editor.
 From there, I found the Root->UserHeaders section, and deleted the
Habeas headers I had added about 4 years ago.

Plist files seem to be in XML format, so you can always edit them
with a text editor. However, if you don't know the structure of XML,
you could make the file unreadable.

David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name

On 19 Jan 2007, at 5.45 pm, David Weintraub wrote:

> How about directions for removing the headers from the Mail.app?


If I understand correctly what you are after, couldn't you go to the
Rules section of Mail's preferences, either add a new rule or edit an
existing one, then choose 'Edit Header List...' from the header pop-
up menu at the start of a criterion?

David