[Spambayes] Latest spammer trick stymied

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> We definitely should NOT crawl the site, just in case it really is an
    >> innocent url.  The load can crush a site, particularly if it's
    >> hosted.

    Richard> Nah. You need to throw thousands of requests at a half-decent
    Richard> web server before it gives up the ghost. And if they're sending
    Richard> out 10 million mail pieces, they should expect their http
    Richard> server to take some load. These are definitely NOT innocent
    Richard> emails. They come from bogus senders, have minimal headers
    Richard> (deliberately), and contain *nothing* but a url. Which points,
    Richard> via redirect naturally, to an incest porn or get-a-huge-penis
    Richard> site, etc.

You can't make that judgement beforehand.  If the site you are poking is a
valid site and the email received was not spam, none of what you said holds.
If I remember correctly, you said this was only to be performed in
circumstances where certain criteria were met, none of which included a
conclusion the mail was spam.

Skip