For those of you who know who Paul Graham is (and even those who don't) here's a recent article of his on the effectiveness of inserting random dictionary words to overcome Bayesian filtering.
Just a few comments (first, Paul Graham is an amazing marketer, and while decent at programming, he is much better at hype than programming):
[1] Naive Bayes tests (the type that Paul Graham made popular a year ago) work very well, *if* a few conditions are met (the most important is that the recipient actively feeds information to their spam program, which requires time and effort). They do not work nearly as well for multiple recipients (on a domain level, or a server level).
[2] Paul new article is flawed -- a discussion on the Spam Tools mailing list recently covered this, and came up with a conclusion opposite to that of Paul. Specifically, not all spammers aren't dumb -- those that are well aware the Naive Bayes tests also know not to add random words (as Paul suggests); instead, they are going to add words that are common to legitimate E-mail.
[3] His suggestion of using a DoS attack against people that send legitimate bulk E-mail -- we'll, that's what hackers (in the media sense of the word) do. Stooping to the level of spammers is not a good idea; in this case, it will cause serious problems for many people. For example, if someone posted a link to a DNS report for a specific domain at http://www.DNSreport.com , it would go to thousands of people -- and we could get thousands of very resource intensive hits within minutes (as opposed to a standard static web page hit that is not very resource intensive).
-Scott
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