[extropy-chat] spam & spelling?

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Brian Atkins <brian at posthuman.com> 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 
> 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.

It would also reinforce the principle of "filter or
bounce, but don't silently delete".  But especially
if it was set to bounce (and flagged if it caught the
bad spelling), this might also screen email from those
who can't be bothered to spell correctly even with
email not intended to be spam - which does have some
correlation with "non-spam" emails that might not be
worth reading anyway.  (And the grammar nazis of the
world celebrate, as those they are infuriated by are
forced to clean up their acts... ;) )