Re: Why is this type of spam not caught?

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:23:26 +0000 Anthony Campbell <ac-MeA/[email protected]>
wrote:

> I'm getting lots of mail which always have the same first line in the
> body:
> 
> 	Deborah has uploaded some new software for you!
> 
> The name changes but the text remains the same.
> 
> Apart from this there is a link to click plus a lot of randomly selected
> text related to free software.
> 
> However many times I feed these to spamprobe it keeps failing to catch
> the next version that arrives. I should have thought the constant
> repetition of the first line would be a give-away. Is there any way to
> make spamprobe look out for a particular phrase like this?

I have the same problem. I guess SP fails, because the body texts of these
messages seem to be copied together from posts to technical mailing lists
and therefore are very hammy. You wouldn't want a good mail discarded just
because the sender chose a bad subject and has a single spammy paragraph
in the mail (which could be a signature auto-appended by a freemail
service).

These spams worry me very much, because if you keep training them as
spam they poison many good terms. E.g. on my SP database "lpd" has turned
into a spam term as have the phrases "boot floppy" and "source route". 
These are terms that I would expect in ham messages on the kind of mailing
lists I read. Seeing them tagged as spam phrases gives me a bad feeling.
I'm just waiting for "FreeBSD" (seems to be contained in all of those
messages) to turn into a spam term. I hate to say it, but including random
snippets from Usenet or mailing list postings in spam was a very smart
move by the spammers. The interesting thing is that they chose technical
mailing lists as source. I don't think that's because the people reading
this kind of stuff are especially likely to fall for spam. Maybe it's
hostility towards the people who write and install antispam software, an
attempt to poison their ham terms to annoy them?


MSB

-- 
Entropy requires no maintenance.


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