Result Codes

Does Sniffer award a point value per message or only a Spam/Non-SPAM response?

That depends upon how you connect Message Sniffer to your mail server. You could use a non-zero (spam) / zero (non-spam) methodology. On the other hand, if you are using a weighting system then you might assign a specific weight to each result code. Most systems consider a non-zero result from SNF to indicate spam. Some systems go further and assign heavier weights to some result codes or even take special actions.

Message Sniffer reports a symbol value which is a "best guess" as to what kind of spam it is. More precisely, the symbol value represents the rule group that won the competition to rate the message. The rule group indicates the kind of spam we were looking at when we coded the rule. Each kind of spam has some special rules for how it is processed. Knowing the rule group helps identify the kind of spam as well as the process that created the rule.

Many spam filtering systems combine multiple tests using a weighting scheme. Declude, mxGuard, and SpamAssassin are all good examples of systems that allow weights to be assigned to specifc result codes from Message Sniffer.