Habeas has infiltrated many popular antispam tools with their “Sender Warranted Email”. Nelson described the technique best:
Habeas thought they had a clever idea: copyright a little haiku, consider any mail that has the haiku to be not spam, then sue any spammer who violates their copyright.The problem is that spammers typically don’t care about these lawsuits and have started including this haiku in their messages. After reading Nelson’s post, I examined the spams that had mad it past SpamAssassin, and he was right—I saw Habeas all over the place. Many others have also noticed this problem.
SpamAssassin gives Habeas a -8 score by default. This is a fair score to give an effective rule, but this rule is obviously failing. So while Nelson recommends giving Habeas a score of 0 in SpamAssassin, effectively removing the rule, I’m giving it a 5, penalizing those who use this haiku: score HABEAS_SWE 5. [via Nelson Minar]
