Habeas

Habeas
Eudora Tip #162/15-Jan-2003

During the summer holiday all the mailing lists I choose to belong to were very quiet, as you’d expect. The spammers however never sleep so suddenly I was receiving about 30 spam messages for every good message.

One new anti-spam strategy has been devised by Habeas. Habeas allows the sender to add a few lines of text to each message which warrant that the message is not Spam. To receive permission to use the Habeas “mark” the sender must meet some fairly strict criteria. [http://www.habeas.com]

The first use I’ve seen of Habeas is Adam Engst’s TidBITS newsletter and companion talk-list. [http://www.tidbits.com]

While TidBITS is one of the finest newsletters around and could never be mistaken for Spam, nevertheless some automated systems have blocked it. Adam says: “Our recent gift issue was rejected by one mail server … because the word “cows” appeared in the text.” [TidBITS#661/06-Jan-03]

By using the Habeas headers, TidBITS and other senders can warrant that their message is not spam.

Unfortunately the Habeas headers add about 9 lines to the top of each message, each line starting with “X-Habeas-SWE”.

The first thing I wanted to do with my TidBITS messages was to hide these headers so I didn’t have to see them if I didn’t choose to. Of course Eudora makes this easy, but first you have to install a file called Esoteric Settings.

Next week’s tip will tell you how to find that file and where to put it, then how to change the relevant settings.