[Air-l] what is spam

Our institution has recently started using Maia Mailguard, which is doing a fine job of recognizing large amounts of incoming spam messages. It also gives me the opportunity to see the rules which it is using to decide what is spam, and I've just noticed that one of the ten rules it used to classify an instance of the Nigerian advance fee fraud mail as spam was that the mail "Contains 'Dear (something)'". Interesting that it is so rare for an email to begin with "Dear..." that it is now considered a *suspect* beginning for a message. :-D