On Friday, August 16, 2002, at 01:10 PM, Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > > <http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html> > > It's a new technique for identifying spam. The more I look into the > details, > the more I think we have the "anti-spam killer app", becaues it tunes > itself > to the individual (or site), adapts as the anti-spammers adapt, and the > technique used is fairly easy to implement and damn difficult for a > spammer > to avoid....
People have been talking about Bayesian filtering for spam for quite a while. It is definitely very promising. But the easiest way to defeat it -- which also works against sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms as in SpamAssassin -- is simply to make the payload of your spam an image, which cannot be turned into lexical tokens for Bayesian analysis. Even if a clickable link is appended, that will not provide sufficient information to declare something spam, since people send URLs to each other all the time. You can simply assert that a message consisting only of an image and a link is spam, but that's not Bayesian, that's just a semantic pattern. -- Michael C. Berch [EMAIL PROTECTED]
