On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 05:42, rich...@buzzhost.co.uk <rich...@buzzhost.co.uk> wrote: > On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 05:08 -0600, LuKreme wrote: >> On 27-Oct-2009, at 04:53, Mike Cardwell wrote: >> > Why have any geocities specific rules any more if geocities doesn't >> > exist? It's not as if spammers can host their websites on geocities >> > anymore so there's no reason why a spammer would include a geocities >> > url in their spam. May as well just delete the rules... >> >> >> If the links are still appearing in SPAM then no, don't delete the >> rules, just bump up the scores. >> > > Would this not be almost entirely pointless? With spam the motto is > 'follow the money'. if the link does not work, there is no path to the > money to follow. Other than prospecting for valid recipients {which > could be done just as easily without the link} there is no benefit for a > spammer to include a link of this nature.
You're assuming that spammers will perfectly update all existing spam. There might be crud floating around out there for a while to come. And, any messages that contain that crud are just as likely to be spam as they were before. My suggestion: proceed as normal. Adjust the scores for geocities spam as the analysis tools on currnet/live* spam suggest, until such time as there are no more spam messages showing up that are hitting the geocities rules ... for at least 1-3 months. Once they stop showing up in the wild for a substantial period of time (ie. my 1-3 months suggestion), THEN remove them from the rules. Not before. (* not the corpus of past/historical/stale spam)