FM engineers have changed my profile to assign a score of 2 instead of 5 for the VADESPAM hit, using a tag ME_VADESPAM_LOW. For me, this is sufficient; had the score been 2 from the start, I'd have seen no false positives and would not even have noticed the new test. Presumably they can do the same for others who have trouble with the test. It has to be done through support and requires a few hours to take effect.
I received more information from an FM engineer, who gave me permission to repost the info. The following is a mixture of the engineer's explanations and my own words.
I think that all tags containing the string "VS" refer to Vade Secure. I don't know whether it's coincidental or intentional that VS can also stand for Virus Scan. Vade Secure is a spam filtering service which FM has begun using. I don't know many details about Vade Secure. In particular, I have no idea what they are doing that the traditional tests don't, except that they are getting data from a variety of sources and thus have the potential to react to fast-developing spam situations far more quickly.
Info from the engineer:
- X-ME-VSCategory is the classification category of a message by VadeSecure;
- X-ME-VSCause is an encoding of the reasons for that classification;
- X-ME-ZSResult is the classification of the message sending IP address by another product we are investigating, at present this is for data gathering only.
I'm also told that they are working on ways to mitigate false positives more quickly, though with no promises of dates or other specifics, just that FM is aware of the issues which have arisen.
Edward