nanog mailing list archives

Re: OT: question re. the Volume of unwanted email (fwd)


From: "Petri Helenius" <pete () he iki fi>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 00:36:28 +0300


Actually, I find that 1.3 and 1.4 still have issues with determining
spam. While fairly decent, one still has to go through looking for false
positives. The other issue is that spammers have been doing a good job
at designing emails to fool filters. I'm starting to see more and more
spam designed to defeat Baynesian filters. By including "good" words in
their emails, they either make good words spammy so that you get more
FP's or they make their email clean enough that it's still in your
inbox. The worst part of it is that spam is quickly becoming unreadable,
so that legitimate emails that are readable are the emails more likely
filtered.

I hope I never get your "legitimate" email. :) Since about 100 messages I practically
stopped visiting the Junk folder every now and then because no false positives
occurred. Just for the sake of this message, I peeked into the folder and scrolled
trough the last ~300 messages and all spam.

About one in 50 does not get flagged and this stream has already gone through
the basic checks like that sender needs to have a legit domain name and such.

So I´m happy camper and I hope that legislation catches up with spammers
before they figure out a surefire way to defeat Baynesians.

Pete



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