SpamAssassin 2.5 (Was Re: [CLUE-Talk] Gibberish in spam messages)

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 03-23 05:23, G. Richard Raab wrote:
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> On 2003 March 22 Saturday 09:46 pm, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> > On Sat, 2003-03-22 at 21:27, Matt Gushee wrote:
> ...
> > My guess, and it is only a guess, is that it is a tracking method for
> > people who report spam. If you use a service like spamcop and report
> > spam, I believe it sends the body of the e-mail to the abuse address --
> > even if it obscures the e-mail address, that may be a clue as to what
> > e-mail address the report came from...
> 
> Not quite. An approach to stopping spam is to look at the body and see if it 
> is similar (RegEx is wonderful). if so, then block it. They are hoping that 
> by inserting random text, that it can fool the blockers. There are other ways 
> to still block them. 

Which reminds me. I've been using SpamAssassin 2.5 for a few weeks now[0]. Has
anyone else switched to this version? Luckily, I had kept my spam mailbox
from the past few months, so I had a lot to train it with. I also trained it
for "ham" with my "keepthis" mailbox, not to mention well-filtered mailing
lists like this. 

It seems to be doing a better job - not that it didn't before. I also set up
a "maybespam" sort of filter, and then I can look at that, and move items in
there to their appropriate place, and that seems to be working well.

Incidentally, SA doesn't seem to have any problems killing those emails with
the random string of text.

[0] Now if I could just get this to work with Outlook at work. I'd just use
Mutt under Cygwin, if it could somehow support calendar/scheduling stuff.
Outlook is so terrible for anything but that feature, and Outlook XP somehow 
managed to be even more bloated, IIRC. And it crashes at least once a day on
me, to boot. I cannot even get my rules to work consistently - I have to run
them manually most of the time. Of all the crapware offerings from MS,
Outlook/Outlook XP irritates me the most. Can you tell? :) FWIW, I tried the
SpamAssassin plug-in for Outlook, but was having issues with it, so I
uninstalled it.

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at americanisp.net  
http://users.americanisp.net/~seanleblanc/
Get MLAC at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlac/
The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder. 
-Frederick W. Faber, "Notes on Doctrinal and Spiritual Subjects"