[Spambayes] Introducing myself

[Tim Peters]

[Tim Stone]
> This makes me wonder what happens if someone spams you with
> various devices
> like c o n v e r t i n g wor ds into var ious c.o.m.b in a.tions of
> w
> h
> i
> t
> e
> s
> p
> a
> c
> e

Most of that would be invisible to us, as we ignore "words" with fewer than
3 characters, so they'd get judged mostly on the header lines, and it's not
easy for spam to get by those even in isolation.

But spammers won't *do* that regardless.  There'a A Reason they use giant
fonts and bright colors:  the harder a msg is to read, the lower the
response rate, and they're not immune to economics.

A better strategy is to just have HTML pointing to a .gif or .jpg out on the
web.  They can make that as gaudy as they like and the classifier won't see
any of it.  This seems quite common in Asian spam now, but Guido speculated
(and I think he's right) that this is more because the Asians are fighting
intractable character-set issues.  I'm seeing more of it now in English spam
too, but it's still rare.  For whatever reasons, this system hasn't had any
trouble learning to call such stuff spam (I expect that the special
tokenizing of URLs we do is helping a lot).