Keith Devens .com

Will Filters Kill Spam?

Yes please? Via Adam, Paul Graham has a new article on spam out: Will Filters Kill Spam?.

We already see plenty of evidence of spammers tweaking their messages to get past simple-minded spam filters based on specific words or patterns. What could they do to get past statistical filters, and will it work?

I've seen things like "R_ates" instead of Rates, "Humans copulating with stallions" rather than women having sex with horses, and a few other ones I can't remember. It's funny, and it seems to indicate that filters are starting to work.

People sometimes ask, what if spammers sent the mail as an image?

I've seen a lot of spammers just encoding the entire message as base64. Graham didn't address this in his article.

Turns out SpamAssassin handles base64 encoded e-mails just fine. I never considered that a filter would unencode a message before, so with a little bit of extra logic, the types of filters Graham talks about can do the same.

Permalink | Comments? | id 3259

01:41 (utc-5)
edited: 2003-01-07 00:16 (utc-5)