[Spambayes] (no subject)

skip at pobox.com skip at pobox.com
Fri Jan 15 20:59:01 CET 2010


    Luc> For example, messages with VIAGRA in the title would be processed
    Luc> in that way. I am sick and tired of those e-mails !

In addition to what Viktor and Amedee wrote, unless you have mistakes in
your training database training a few such messages as spam should serve to
effectively eliminate those messages.  In addition, you will provide other
clues to the spam filter which you might otherwise miss.

For example, suppose Spam King gets a contract to send out 50 million emails
about Viagra and you are one of the unfortunate recipients of his missives.
Besides the references to various spellings of that little blue pill his
messages will almost certainly contain other clues which you probably won't
notice (or won't be able to use in an Outlook filter if you did notice).
SpamBayes will notice this stuff, clues such as the network it came from,
the Unicode encoding of the message, whether it's HTML or plain text email,
or the IP address range of the website(s) Spam King wants you to visit.  You
see some of these messages and train them as spam.  Voila! No more little
blue pill messages from Spam King.

But it gets better.  Now suppose S.K. gets a contract to advertise forged
Vancouver Olympics tickets from some nefarious Nigerians (*), something
you're unlikely to be interested in (even if they weren't forged) because
while Vancouver is overrun by south-of-the-49th-parallel Americans all you
want to do is take a two-week trip to Puerto Vallarta to get away from us
<wink>.  It's likely some of those other invisible-to-you clues are going to
be in the new crop of spams.  You might never see such messages because the
invisible clues are powerful enough evidence that the message is spam all by
themselves.  Straight into the bit bucket they go and you can focus on fare
sale emails for Puerto Vallarta getaways from Orbitz and Kayak.

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/

(*) http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeria.asp


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