Personal spam statistic observation

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 08:37:20 -0500
From: Art Wolinsky <awolinsky () oii org>
Subject: Personal spam statistic observation
X-Sender: awolinsk () pop oii org
To: dave () farber net

I get between 200-300 pieces of spam a day about a 18 months ago I got a 
spam filter and trained it over a period of about six months.  I got it to 
the point where is was picking up about 70% of the spam while only 
erroneously identifying about 1 in 10,000 legitimate messages as spam. 
Tweaking it any further would raise the number of legitimate messages that 
got flagged.

After Jan. 1 I noticed that I was getting more spam in my in box and less 
in the filter.  This morning when I checked my accounts 212 pieces of spam 
got through the filter and only ONE was stopped.

They fall mostly in two categories.  The first is the strange spellings and 
odd characters that would be impossible to effectively train this filter to 
recognize because of the infinite number of permutations.  The second type 
is very short messages with a single link.  There is no way you can train a 
filter to stop those without erroneously identifying an unacceptable number 
of legitimate messages as spam.

While I haven't seen a significant change in the number, there is a 
significant change in the form of the messages.  I fear that the amount of 
spam will rise dramatically as the off-shore spammers increase in number 
and use these techniques.

The new law has not only worsened the situation, it has rendered my spam 
filter almost totally useless. I may as well uninstall it to save a few 
bytes of space on my hard drive.

Art Wolinsky

******************************************************************
 Art Wolinsky
 OII Technology Director      http://oii.org
 awolinsky () oii org             (609) 597-9481 ext 337
******************************************************************
I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes.
I will surely learn a great deal today.
******************************************************************


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