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Re: [News] Windows Spewage (SPAM) Knocks Down School's E-mail

  • Subject: Re: [News] Windows Spewage (SPAM) Knocks Down School's E-mail
  • From: Kelsey Bjarnason <kbjarnason@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:33:44 -0700
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com
  • References: <1775715.3vCf0SlvOg@schestowitz.com> <45F2A95C.1010209@bullet3.fsnet.oc.ku>
  • User-agent: pan 0.120 (Plate of Shrimp)
  • Xref: ellandroad.demon.co.uk comp.os.linux.advocacy:504134
On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:46:28 +0000, Robert Newson wrote:

> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> 
>> School email's out across UK
> ...
>> Gates said SPAM would vanish by 2006.
> 
> It has /vanished/: how much spam do you /see/ after your spam filter has had 
> a go at it?

A hell of a lot, actually.

Spam filtering suffers two major problems.  First is determining what is
actually a spam; second is determining what *isn't* a spam.

For example, a lot of current spams are essentially empty emails, with a
gif attachment.  The actual "buy my whatever" is in the image file, and is
done with sufficient noise that even if you had the resources to perform
OCR on every image attachment, the results wouldn't be good.

So, do we block empty messages with image attachments?  Nope, because a
lot of people send them legitimately - cute pics they find around the net,
etc.

How about Viagra?  Surely we can blacklist that, right?  Sure, until your
buddy sends you some joke about the guy who took a whole bottle at once. 
Zot, your buddy's now been blacklisted as a spammer, or, at the least, his
email got rejected.

'Course, you can always blacklist Viagra and empty messages with images,
but whitelist your buddy; that way his emails get through, right?

Sure, until his system is infected and spews you some spam claiming to
come from him.  Voila, spam in your inbox.  Even worse, if your spam
system "learns", it may regard these mails - being from a whitelisted
sender - as legitimate, and reduce the efficiency of subsequent
detection of spams of this sort.

And so on and so forth.

It ain't easy filtering spams effectively.

-- 
Do not contact me at kbjarnason@xxxxxxxxxxx

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