All:

I've run across a new text obfuscation method in active use by spammers. It appears to be an attempt to bypass RE-based text matching of words. Rules you write will need modification to not be spoofed by this.

Unfortunately the RE engine considers the underscore as being a "word" character, so a rule like /\bthis advertisement\b/ can be defeated by replacing the spaces in the sentence with underscores. This is still readable to a human but foils the word-boundary check.

Recommendation: instead of a bare \b, use (?:\b|_) and instead of embedded spaces use [-_\s]

Examples:

Manage_advertising_preferences_here

To_remove_yourself_from_this_admail,_please_do_so_here

Be_removed_from_this_important_offer

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 John Hardin KA7OHZ                    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
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