Re: [tlug] giving up on email

[David Santinoli <u235@example.com>]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 02:13:04PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
>     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.

That's my point - by knowing the regex you're using, I can devise a
variation on the theme which will slip through (e.g. "\/iagra").
While this represents a marginal advantage for the spammer in this
cat-and-mouse game, I agree that in the long run it will disrupt
communication as stated in the NYT article.

BTW, spamvertised domain names too are getting more and more
meaningless...

Cheers
 David
-- 
 David Santinoli, Milano             +   <david@example.com>
 Independent Linux/Unix consultant   +   http://www.santinoli.com