Re: [tlug] giving up on email

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "David" == David Santinoli <u235@example.com> writes:

    David> Talking about an "out-of-the-box" - i.e. untrained -
    David> SpamAssassin, the bad guys have an obvious advantage over
    David> the good ones: they can run their mail text through the
    David> filter and fine-tune it until it gets classified as
    David> "clean".

Not so fast.  If your goal is DoS, yes, you can send random mail through.

But if you want to advertise Viagra, you have to say "Viagra".  If you
first preprocess out punctuation and spaces, the regular expression
"[vb].?[il1].?[a@].?g.?r.?[a@]" is going to catch all the misspellings
of "Viagra" that I've seen.  It would be an interesting experiment to
see how many false positives doubling the number of nuisance
characters would produce; I don't know.  Anyway, that knocks out 90%
of the Cialis 'verts too, because they say "better than Viagra".

Chuqui (Chuq Rospach, who is probably the smartest strategist on
mailman-developers) points out that this means that spam is becoming
essentially unreadable, which is going to drive the response rates
even lower than they already are.  He thinks this means that the
spammers are going to be forced out of business in the not-so-distant
future.

http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001252.html

(The link he gives to the NYT is pay-per-vert, don't bother.)

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.