[extropy-chat] spam & spelling?

Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc. megao at sasktel.net
Sun Jul 25 21:20:57 UTC 2004


Spam filters to be effective should be designed to data mine representative
database
of the recipient's documents and mail to create a dictionary or terms and
phrases
ranked by use and personal importance, independant of date stamping.
Filtering would be on a ranking of incoming content against historically
accepted
content.
Our ISP  SASKTEL does a reasonably good job of catching most spam, however I
do find it catches the odd thing it should not.  Content based filtering
might at least rank familiar content in spam higher than  dissallowed
content.
I have looked through the spam box and find that in addition to the nonsense
headers, misspelled headers, etc there is one new addition and that is the
addition of a paragraph or 2 of legitimate
technical content to an otherwise porn page.  This would still make it past
the content filter, but
it seems the SASKTEL filter does a nice job of picking them off.  Also, the
Nigerian Scam letters
seem to be totally gone for the last 3 months.


>From a sender's viewpoint spam filters that catch items based on large
numbers of recipients are a bit bothersome.  For example If I have an item
that I want to have  sent to all 300 Members of the Canadian Parliament so
that they are briefed as to background I feel might allow debate of and
amendment to a forthcoming bill, and send it to all 300 at once it will
likely be filed into the spam
box.  So I will have to break the 300 down into 15 groups of 20.

In a way spammers have during their short lifetime done at least 1 valuable
service; they have pushed us all to create these filters and better organize
and target our mailings.

MFJ

Brian Atkins wrote:

> I'm sure this has occurred to developers working on spam filters, and
> perhaps it has even been implemented, but anyway:
>
> 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.
>
> Anyone know of any filters that use this technique?
> --
> Brian Atkins
> Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
> http://www.singinst.org/
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list