Keith Devens .com

One of the best things about Bayesian spam filtering

One of the best things about Bayesian spam filtering is that any domain that's ever used in a spam e-mail immediately gets a high spam probability. So, once a domain is used, it becomes essentially useless (really, a hinderance) to the spammer. That's one of the ways in which spam filtering helps increase spammers' costs. Of course, they can try just using the IP address, but IP address octets wind up getting pretty high spam ratings themselves. Plus, the URL of any page they ever use on their site gets a high spam rating, so they have to keep creating new URLs, not to mention, of course, that their message still has to pass a spam filter's muster. I love it when I see messages that are mangled beyond recognition in an effort to avoid spam detection that still rate like a 97% spam. All of this increases their cost of doing business.

Everyone gets real doomsayer-ey real fast. Spam isn't that old, neither is e-mail, and neither are the methods for dealing with spam. It all will get better and work itself out over time.

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