[Spambayes] One potential problem with this filter apporach

[Meyer, Tony]

> I was thinking about the way the spambayes 
> works, and I think I have thought of a way spammers could get 
> around it. A devious spammer could use images as instead of 
> text. So the email would just contain an HTML table. It's 
> something you guys should think about how your filter will 
> operate on these types of emails.

I would be surprised if this worked.  Spambayes doesn't really care what
messages contain, just whether they (well, the tokens) are more similar
to messages you have trained as spam, or those you've trained as ham.

Unless you have a lot of ham that looks like this, then the few clues
that would get generated would probably have high spam prob.  There's
also the headers, of course, which generate their own clues.

I don't think that this method would get around a pseudo-bayesian system
(like Spambayes) nearly as well as other methods - like quoting a
message that you wrote at the end of their mail.

=Tony Meyer