At 09:14 PM 3/31/03 +1000, Richard Jowsey wrote:
So today I added a simple web-crawler, which will venture out on demand and slurp the words off any site. This little hoover is only unleashed when the number of distinct clues/words in an email is less than 150, it's heading for the "unsure" bucket, and we find an http URL in there. The entire source HTML is then whacked through the tokenizer and classified.
Won't this just convince spammers that: 1) Their spam is "working", because "people are clicking on the link", and 2) If there's a unique ID in the URL, it will confirm that your address is live and that you're a sucker for whatever it is they mailed you. :) Of course, I also suppose it's possible that if enough people install a spam filter that works this way, the resulting "spambayes effect" might crash a few of their servers. :)