off topic -- spam assassin

[Steve Holden]

"Jacob Hallen" <jacob at boris.cd.chalmers.se.cd.chalmers.se> wrote ...
> In article <mailman.1033055435.7410.python-list at python.org>,
> Skip Montanaro  <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
> >
> >    Laura> On the advice of several of you here, I installed spam
assassin,
> >    Laura> and had a pleasant six months of nearly spam free mail.  Thank
> >    Laura> you, each and every one of you who recommmended it.  Alas, the
> >    Laura> spammers have got smarter, and I am now getting 25+ pieces of
> >    Laura> spam that aren't caught by spam assassin every day again. :-(
> >    Laura> What's new for our side of the arms race?
> >
> >Laura,
> >
> >The tension between spammers and the people who develop spam-fighting
> >software can be likened to an arms race.  It's fairly clear the spammers
use
> >tools like SA to make their mailings more likely to get through.  If you
> >installed SA six months ago, I'd suspect you're running 2.20 or
thereabouts.
> >Since then 2.31 and 2.41 have been released.  You might want to upgrade.
>
> There is actually one big difference between the spam race and an arms
race.
> In an arms race, the attacker creates bigger, smarter and more powerful
> weapons in order to overcome the defenses of the defender.
>
> In the spam race, the attackers will have to become more subtle and low-
> keyed in order to overcome the defenses. An equilibrium will be reached
> when it is no longer possible for a computer to distinguish between spam
> and ordinary mail. However, it will be interesting to see what porn sites,
> Nigeria letters, chain letter scams and work at home schemes will look
like
> without using the familiar phrases. Maybe something like:
>
> Can we interest you in life like reproductions of ladies of negotiable
> affection wearing attire suitable for extremly warm climates.
>

I'm guessing, but I suspect that spambayes and similar tools are the answer.
Unfortunately spamassassin runs the same for everybody, and therefore the
spammers (may their souls rot in a specially prepared Hell where they have
nothing but their own output to read) are quite capable of ferkling with
their mails until they get under spamassassin's guard.

The reason I like the spambayes approach is because *I* train it on the mail
that *I* regard as spam, and the spammers have no access to my training
corpus. Therefore they cannot know (except in general terms) whether my
filter is likely to reject it.

Even for spamassassin, I suspect the phrase "can we interest you" might set
some alarms ringing...

regards
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Steve Holden                                  http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                 http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/
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