[Spambayes] Is this a sign of future problems ?

[Tim Stone]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:45:09 -0500, Chuck Lewis <clewis at iquest.net> wrote:


> So is he on to something here ? This sounds plausible from my admittedly
> limited understanding of these tools.

There are a couple reasons a spammer might do something like this... one 
is to probe for valid addresses.  However, it would be completely 
ineffective as a tool to poison bayesian filtering databases.  These 
filters work on the words that are in the mail, not on the words that are 
not in the mail.  So including words that are unrecognizable can have no 
adverse effect on the database, or the filter's ability to recognize spam 
based on the content of the database.  In fact, an additional filtering 
technique could easily be developed which would create a token based on 
the number of words that are NOT in the database... so they're probably 
shooting themselves in the foot...


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