[Spambayes] More "spam of the future" lately?

[Kenny Pitt]

Tim Peters wrote:
> [Matthew Dixon Cowles]
>> I've gotten a few of those lately. I've found that Richard Jowsey's
>> idea of retrieving the URLs in messages that score in the unsure
>> range and scoring the pages received as a sort of synthesized message
>> helps a good bit.
> 
> Is that checked in as a "standard albeit experimental" option yet?  It
> should be.
> 
>> That's a somewhat controversial thing to do. People have pointed out
>> that if everyone did it, it would enable a spammer to engineer a
>> distributed denial-of-service attack against some site they didn't
>> like.
> 
> There aren't enough spambayes users for me to worry about that; then
> cut by the number who would actually enable this option, and multiply
> by their unsure rate.  It wouldn't amount to much in the end.

My biggest concern here would be verifying my e-mail address to all the
spammers.  By retrieving the content of a link in order to classify it,
you have performed the same operation as clicking on it and have thus
triggered any "web bug" attached to that link in the form of an
identifying query parameter.

-- 
Kenny Pitt