[59212] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: OT: question re. the Volume of unwanted email (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Bates)
Wed Jun 18 17:06:50 2003
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:09:42 -0500
From: Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net>
To: Petri Helenius <pete@he.iki.fi>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <004701c335da$eb36b6c0$812a40c1@PETEX31>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Petri Helenius wrote:
>
> Isnīt "highlight and hit delete" exactly what has been implemented since
> Mozilla 1.3 and works with almost perfect accuracy after you give it a few
> dozen messages to build up the "good and bad" database with?
>
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.
-Jack
