Improved Spam Detection – August 15, 2025

I recently noticed that unblocked spams had gone up and that our mail server was getting error reports from a spam checking service konwn as "validity". Which is yet another list that tries to promote good internet behavior by listing good and bad actors.  However, reportedly, they have changed their free service layer from a reasonable number of hits down to 13 per hour.  This causes three rules to be hit in the default configuration of SpamAssassin to be hit: RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_CERTIFIED,RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_RPBL, and RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_SAFE, two of which are negative rules (negative means a good email), and thus emails that would have otherwise been tagged as spam were now being marked good.

I talked to their support to figure out what was going on, since my mail volume hadn't changed, but they refused to disclose that they had made any changes and refused to look up my account but just copy and pasted information from their website.

I disabled their service on our mail server, and our spam went down!  I hadn't thought to google them previously, and discovered that they've been trying to increase their income and since they did it in a manner that irritated various people and Validity was just removed from the default configuration of SpamAssassin (might require a login to even read the bug report), but for any of you who haven't updated yet, you should add this to your /etc/spamassassin/local.cf configuration to disable validity and restore spam checking to its proper levels

score RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_SAFE 0
score RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_CERTIFIED 0
score RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_RPBL 0