> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Tony Meyer > Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2005 2:39 PM > > > > V P A V X C > > I r m A a I > > A o b L n A > > G z i I a L > > R a e U x I > > A c n M S > > $69,95 $85,45 $99,95 > > http://armelaurofishruner.tripod.com > [...] > > I've got to hand it to these folks for deviousness. Looks like > > it came through a trojaned dynamic IP machine in Mexico. > > And the results... > > Do you really think that these messages actually sell anything?
I certainly hope not! It's been said before that very few people have gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. > Don't people receiving it see a bunch of junk? I've also seen this > one using CSS rather than tables, BTW. It look like junk to me, but it made me laugh because it's obvious why they did it. The vertical column approach is clever in that they can keep reordering the columns so you won't see consistent letter combinations in the rows and can't train on it. I was satisfied that it scored unsure and intentionally did not add it to my training set. > > To counter these sorts of tricks requires moving into 'eye-space', > which means building an HTML/CSS renderer, which would be a > big task, and I'm not convinced it would be that worth it. Strongly agree. This is outside the solution space of Spambayes. This spam a crude step on the way to passing an image to hide their text completely. Of course, then we get HTML tags and a URL, so I'm not worried. > I think messages like this are better countered with other > techniques (that trojaned machine could well have been on a > blacklist somewhere, for example, or we can check out the > content of the URL, as the experimental slurping options do). I tend to agree. The trojaned machine's IP was not yet blacklisted when it hit my MX, but it was soon after, so other people could reject it. The included URL's don't always last that long, in which case there are blacklists for spamvertised URL's like SURBL http://www.surbl.org/. If the URL is not forcibly taken down, then Spambayes can learn it _and_ SURBL will have it. I haven't felt the need to use SURBL because Spambayes works so well as it is, but it's nice to know that it's there should it be necessary. -- Seth Goodman _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes Check the FAQ before asking: http://spambayes.sf.net/faq.html
