Re: tlug: AOL Spam

[Fredric Fredricson <fredric.fredriksson@example.com>]

Darren Cook wrote:
> 
> Is there anything here in this Spam email (which I managed to get in two
> accounts!) which identifies it as spam? I get odd genuine emails from AOL
> users, otherwise I'd just have the mail server refuse all *.aol.com! 90% of
> my spam comes from AOL users.
> 
I have never seen a spam mail that did not contain the sequence \$[0-9]+
or
maybe [0-9]+\$ and was less than 2k in size.

Other siginificant common features I have noticed:
* Sender name contains numbers.
* Sender host is very often aol.com or some other major ISP.
* Body contains words and phrases such as "make money" "making money",
  "money-making", "special offer", "investment" etc
* Scenteces all in uppercase
* Lines like "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"
I am sure there are others features also.

Spam does not _really_ bother me that much. Can't be more than one or
two in a hundred emails but I always get upset because I DID NOT ASK
FOR IT. I have dreamt of some algorithm or heuristic to automatically 
delete spam. 
Maybe it would be possible to find some common characteristics in spam
that would make a spam-filter possible. Interesting idea ;-).
The big drawback would be that you actually had to read some spam find
out how to make a filter ;-(.

/Fredric
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