[extropy-chat] spam & spelling?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 12:57:33PM -0500, Brian Atkins wrote:

> Why not judge email messages by spelling errors, and if they have too 
> many then they get marked as spam? This would seem to get around the 

You might observe most messages nowaday come as multipart, and contain some
more or less coherent verbiage -- while less than Markov chain text
generator. AI literature is full of very good story generators, so you can
assume spammers will be able to generate impeccable text once they're forced
to.  

The HTML markup is disjointed, so you have to prerender that, to make sure
only human-visible part will get translated. This is not so very trivial.

Another score point is disparity between plain text part and the
(prerendered) HTML part. Of course, you can still package the text in
pictures...

> current problem of spammers coming up with all kinds of misspellings to 
> get around current spam filters. And most mail clients have a 
> user-extendable dictionary built in already for spell checking that 
> could be used.
> 
> Now to catch a high percentage of spam you might have to set this kind 
> of filter to judge pretty harshly, and it might tend to catch legitimate 
> emails. So it will have to be used as only part of a larger spam filter 
> algorithm, but I do think it would help.

Sounds like a good plugin for SpamAssassin. 
 
> Anyone know of any filters that use this technique?

Not me, but I'm getting lots less spam these days.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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