Habeas

To help SpamSieve catch the spam that is circulating right now, I recommend that everyone choose Preferences… from the SpamSieve menu and uncheck the “Honor Habeas headers” checkbox.

Habeas is a service that licenses a haiku to users who agree not to send spam e-mails. The users can then include the following text in their e-mails:

X-Habeas-SWE-1: winter into spring
X-Habeas-SWE-2: brightly anticipated
X-Habeas-SWE-3: like Habeas SWE (tm)
X-Habeas-SWE-4: Copyright 2002 Habeas (tm)
X-Habeas-SWE-5: Sender Warranted Email (SWE) (tm). The sender of this
X-Habeas-SWE-6: email in exchange for a license for this Habeas
X-Habeas-SWE-7: warrant mark warrants that this is a Habeas Compliant
X-Habeas-SWE-8: Message (HCM) and not spam. Please report use of this
X-Habeas-SWE-9: mark in spam to <http://www.habeas.com/report/>.

By default, when SpamSieve sees this text in a message, it assumes that the message is not spam. Why? It used to be a very good indication that the message was good, since Habeas has promised to sue anyone who includes Habeas’s haiku in a spam message. Alas, this no longer seems to be a strong deterrent, and spammers have started including these headers in their messages in order to get through the filters. When you uncheck “Honor Habeas headers,” SpamSieve will treat these messages like all others, which should enable it to catch this latest raft of spam.