[Spambayes] Latest spammer trick stymied

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:14 PM 3/31/03 +1000, Richard Jowsey wrote:
>So today I added a simple web-crawler, which will venture out on
>demand and slurp the words off any site. This little hoover is only
>unleashed when the number of distinct clues/words in an email is less
>than 150, it's heading for the "unsure" bucket, and we find an http
>URL in there. The entire source HTML is then whacked through the
>tokenizer and classified.

Won't this just convince spammers that:

1) Their spam is "working", because "people are clicking on the link", and

2) If there's a unique ID in the URL, it will confirm that your address is 
live and that you're a sucker for whatever it is they mailed you.  :)

Of course, I also suppose it's possible that if enough people install a 
spam filter that works this way, the resulting "spambayes effect" might 
crash a few of their servers.  :)