Spam control (was: BitTorrent and Comcast?)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, at 2:27pm, moon at lunarhub.com wrote:
> I believe that he aim of such messages is to poison the cache of filters
> such as SpamAssassin and POPFile ...

  That is generally assumed to be the intent, yes.

> I'm not at all sure that this sort of thing accomplishes its goal, though,
> as many of the words that appear in these messages are in fact rather
> obscure ...

  Moreover, they're obviously not English language.  It's pretty trivial for
a smart filter to pick up on random word stuffing.  SpamAssassin 3.0 does
well on this.

  What's nastier is that spammers are now starting to include "real" text in
their spam.  They seem to be either using public domain works (from Project
Gutenberg, I'll bet), or fragments of stuff harvested from the
web/Usenet/something.  Since this all that stuff is, in effect, the same
language real people use (spammers are not people), filtering on word
frequency and sentence structure alone will not work.  Yuck.

  BTW, I highly recommend SpamAssassin 3.0, which was just released last
week.  It has a lot of new rules which do a fantastic job, even without
training.  Along with rules for the latest spam du jour (pharmacy stuff,
especially), it adds a number of RBLs for spamvertised URLs.  That means
that SA 3.0 is targeting the websites of the actual "products" being foisted
on people, and not the method of sending the mail.  Right now, at least,
that seems to work fantastically.

  http://spamassassin.apache.org/

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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