The title of this post is taken directly from the subject line of a spam that I just received on my work email. Our company's mail servers have spam filters that block out tremendous amounts of spam each day, but lately I've seen a number of these getting through. The use of unusual words is the latest attempt by the spammers to get around Bayesian filters. It works to some extent, but by rendering their messages nonsensical it makes it quite simple for me to delete their messages unread.
Further, they are being forced to insert random words and punctuation into the body of the emails, which makes them almost unreadable. If we can at least continue to force the spammers to make themselves spout gibberish then we may eventually win this war. Spammers have to push a product at some point in their messages, but that's hard to do when they're forced to write gibberish to get past the filters. Or at least that's my hope. Given that spammers are fiendishly clever technically, but abysmally stupid socially, I may be hoping for too much.
Alternately, we may be able to take advantage of the gibberish nature of the spam to enhance the Bayesian filters with another layer of filtering that looks at grammar and structure. Granted, this might require the current generation of IM-kiddies to learn to spell and to write in complete sentences, but I think of that as a feature rather than a bug.
Posted by Aubrey at March 25, 2004 08:35 AMShoot! Here I thought I was going to read a post about your arctic seal hunting trip with Merle Haggard.
Posted by: Full Auto at March 25, 2004 10:09 AM