[extropy-chat] Spam

Robert J. Bradbury bradbury at aeiveos.com
Tue Dec 30 17:36:39 UTC 2003


On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Major wrote:

> Many of them are using the multipart/alternate MIME type with crud in
> the test/plain version and their advertisement in the text/html version.

Actually I think its "multipart/alternative".  I suspect you could catch
a good amount of it by simply flagging "multipart/alternative" and "text/html".
The other thing I'm noticing is a lot of messages that just have an HTML
pointer to a jpg/gif.

Major is correct about the crap -- it began when Bayesian filters started
becoming popular -- its an attempt to put in enough good words into the
message that a few bad words don't cause the message to be flagged as SPAM.

I suspect that one could catch this with grammer filters but then they
would just start taking paragraphs out of public News/BBS posts or
some other similar source of human authored text.

NY Times had an interesting article about the difficulties SPAMers face
now-a-days:
  An Unrepentant Spammer Vows to Carry On, Wiithin the Law
  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/30/technology/30spam.html

Robert





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