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Re: spam with anti-bayesian parts


From: "Paul Farrow" <pfarrow () flamenetworks co uk>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 11:15:38 -0000

Ahhh! dont give the spammers ideas :o
But I dare say it'd be harder to program a random spam message that needs to
grab new text from a site, unless the site has an XML feed or something...
no more ideas! i get enough free viagra, online meds, home remorgages,
financial aid, and paris hilton sex tapes daily - i wonder how many filters
just marked this as spam...


To wind up the earlier thread I started when I thought it might have been
a
misbehaving worm:

The first spams with 2 lines of ad and 20 lines of random garbage words
arrived in my mailbox yesterday, going cleanly through the bayesian
filters.
The explanations on this list are thus proven correct.

The filters DID give them a 70% spam probability based on bayesian
filtering, so I figure it will be a matter of some training and they'll go
away.


What I'm wondering is:
Why do the spammers even go to the length of using random words? Those are
easy to filter out with some heuristics (e.g. missing punctuation). Why
don't they grab some real text, say from a news site? There's an endless
supply of new, proper text out there.

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