Rejection rules

The content of this page should NOT be visible to users outside of STAR.

This page documents the base rejection rules. Hypernews in STAR will reject Emails upon one or more of the below conditions (all rules are case insensitive wherever it applies).

Early rejection rules (Email content analysized)

  • A post will be rejected if the subject contains one of the following
    • the string {Spam? or {Virus?  appears as set by BNL Mail gatekeeper upon detection of a spam or virus
    • the string returned mail or autoreply appears anywhere in the subject. This is added fake auto-replies to end as a posting
    • the pattern \w+\s+wrote:\s* appears in the subject (this was added based on a popular spam subject)
  • The following senders will be rejected automatically: postmaster, mailer-daemon, symantec
  • The Email body contains an HTML preamble of the form DOCTYPE HTML  - this rejects tones of spam attempting to send HTML formatted content with embedded links or code, leveraging mail readers ability to auto-expand (even without a MIME attached HTML preamble)

Posting rejection rules - Further analysis of a content will be made for attachments and special formatting and rejection applies if one or more of the below cases appear

  • Content-type text/html of the DOCTYPE HTML ; this is to forbid HTML based spam (note this rejection is redundant with an earlier stage rejection)
  • Apple-Mail in quoted-printable text/html format
  • Attachments containing any application or any octet-stream format
  • Encoded content in base64 (as specified by content transfer encoding)