[Spambayes] RE: whitelisting

Tony Meyer tameyer at ihug.co.nz
Tue Apr 13 00:55:18 EDT 2004


>> Just my $0.02: one of the recent strains of viruses/worms
>> goes into a person's address book and sends mails either
>> to those addresses faking the 'From:' or uses those
>> addresses as the 'From:'. If you unquestionably trust
>> whitelisting, this kind of malware will hit you square
>> between the eyes.  
>
> True, but we are trying to block spam, not viruses.
[...]
> One tool for each purpose.

While I agree with this in principle, sometimes something that is good at
(and aimed towards) one thing, just happens to do another really well.
There's nothing much in SpamBayes that's aimed at picking viruses (there are
one or two tokens that are easy to spot, IIRC), but it does quite well at
spotting them anyway (since they're often more homogenous than spam anyway).

I think that the line between viruses and spam is becoming much harder to
find.  From what I've read and seen, it's becoming much more common to use
viruses as a spamming tool - either to harvest addresses or to use
compromised machines to send spam.

I don't know what the future holds, but if it's more of these compromised
machines, then whitelisting will become less and less effective.  Until this
year, I hadn't received any spam from people I know here in New Zealand, but
I get a couple each week now.  Not much bother now (even if they weren't
classified correctly, which they are), but it will be if they continue to
increase in frequency.

It's probably obvious by now, but I'm yet another person that would be quite
happy for SpamBayes to have some sort of whitelisting gimmick, but would
have it turned off, and doesn't have the inclination to contribute towards
coding it.

=Tony Meyer

---
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