“Habeas Spam”

Yesterday I received a bunch of spam with Habeas headers. Those are special headers added to email that are supposed to gurantee that the message is NOT spam. The group that came up with the idea owns the trademark on those headers, and anybody who uses them without permission is suppsoed to be spanked by the courts until they can't sit down for at least a month.

SpamSieve, my spam filter of choice, has a preference setting to honor or ignore Habeas headers. I chose to honor them, hoping that they'd actually work. This tells SpamSieve that if the message has the special headers then it shouldn't bother checking to see if the mail is spam.

Unfortunately, the only mail with Habeas headers that I've ever received (that I know of) has been spam. Yesterday I got at least a dozen such messages, and yes some of them have been reported.

I hope the courts have an extra long paddle for these guys.

(Michael Tsai, SpamSieve's author, has a story about the Habeas problem, too.)