[extropy-chat] SPAM: update

[Robert J. Bradbury]

Given the Gmail comments and discussion of SPAM filters, I
thought I'd run a check on my filters.

Looks like SPAM is targeted at my very old email address at
a rate of 1 every 5 minutes.  That includes a couple of
viruses a day on average.  Fortunately a combination of
SpamBouncer (rule based) and SpamProbe (Bayesian) and a
little custom filtering is catching all but about 1% of it.

But the spamers are doing their darndest to work around the
Bayesian filter either by adding random words, paragraphs
from actual text sources, or changing the spelling of things
like drug names.  It looks like they are also starting to
change their system names on a regular basis so the spam
can't be trapped on the basis of URLs they are sending.
Some have resorted to eliminating URLs entirely.

So we are making it harder but its a tough uphill climb.

I would hate to even speculate on how much computing power and
electricity are being devoted to filtering this crap at the
major email providers and/or ISPs.

Robert