On Friday 20 October 2006 18:55, Tony Meyer wrote: > >> I'm currently writing a column in PC Authority magazine > >> (www.pcauthority.com.au <http://www.pcauthority.com.au/> ) on the > >> new wave > >> of spam that use randomised or semi-randomised words to confound > >> Bayesian > >> filters. > > > > I can take this, cos it's in my timezone, > > Plus you speak the local language ;)
Does babelfish not have a Kiwi-ese to English translator? Pah. > I think that people have shown that random words are pretty > ineffective (e.g. John Graham-Cumming at 2004's MIT Spam > Conference). Random paragraphs (those news clippings and the like) > are a bit more effective. I think that image-based spam is clearly > far superior to any sort of random-word technique, though (although > some of the image-spam also has the random words - I'm not sure that > really helps the spammer, though). The stuff that slips through for me tends to have a lot of individual lines from various news articles, smashed together randomly. My favourite one (this didn't get through - I just noticed it when emptying my spam box) was one that had something like [%RANDOM_LINE_1%] [%RANDOM_LINE_2%] [%RANDOM_LINE_3%] [%RANDOM_LINE_4%] Ah spammers - clearly they're the best and the brightest. :) The nasty one which I've only seen occasionally would be one that spammed by replying to an email you'd already sent (either from a public mailing list archive or from the mailbox of a compromised PC). Fortunately, the cost to individualise spams like this is much much higher than mass random blasting, so I've seen very very little of it. The ones I have seen seem to be manually entered - someone will reply to a post with "Have you heard about XYZspamproduct" with a link. Image spam could be more of a problem, except that the less text in the message, the more header clues come into play, as well. While SB doesn't do a massive amount of, for instance, RBL checking, defense in depth (spamassassin+graylisting on the server, SB on the client) seems pretty effective. I'll email the guy back. Anthony -- Anthony Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> It's never too late to have a happy childhood. _______________________________________________ spambayes-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes-dev
