spam filled box
Oh so much spam. I don’t know what has happened in the last 48 hours or so, but the amount of spam I’ve received has gone up so much, and my filters in thunderbird just aren’t catching it all. Well, its catching a lot (671 pieces since Monday morning), but I still had over 100 in my boxes this morning that must be using a new trick to get around the baysian filters.
Then this evening when I got home (and consequently finished typing this post that waited on my screen all day), I had about 200 more that the filters caught, but 100 or so that they didn’t. Is it some special spamming holiday??!! My Goodness!!
Comments
If you have cpanel and spam assasin, I would highly recommend going into it and turning spam assasin on and then start adding email filters based on the spam assasin headers. I have all my questionable email either blocked completely or redirected to a junk mailbox I can check quickly once a week or so, glancing over it to make sure I haven’t missed any real pieces of mail. I’ve found client side spam filters to be almost completely useless. Using cpanel and spam assasin headers to filter out my spam has reduced the amount of spam I get daily to maybe one or two pieces. Highly effective.
Posted by: lynda | January 22, 2004 05:28 AM
ugh! sounds awful! what a nuisance. my spam filter actually gets most of it, but it is still super annoying. i am hoping they can implement a "do not spam list". and soon!
Posted by: jane | January 22, 2004 06:08 AM
I’ve also had a whole bunch of spam messages that Thunderbird hasn’t been able to catch. It’s really getting annoying, and I hate those spammers worse than ever.
Posted by: Rickie Beth | January 22, 2004 06:09 AM
I’ve found the combination of Eudora 6 and POPFile along with my ISP’s spamblocking (although lately ISP spamblocking has been sucking) has reduced the amount of spam that reaches my eyeballs. POPFile tags the spam, and I have Eudora filter on the tag. Eudora 6 also has it’s own junk filters which work reasonably well.
Posted by: imabug | January 22, 2004 11:51 AM
There are some quite easy ways to fool a Bayes filter.
1. Include random tags (legal or inside HTML mail, to prevent the Bayes filter from detecting spam-like words. Works until someone (really everyone) creates a filter that strips markup before evaluating.
2. Include large portions of semirandom words that you’re very likely to find in legitimate mail.
3. The worst kind I’ve encountered so far pretty much defies any spam filter: The mail message consists of only an image - since there is no distinctive content to filter, there’s nothing that says this is "spam".
Having said that, the real solution to the spam problem isn’t by creating newer, more advanced filtes. The real solution is through real legislation that outlaws spam. With severe punishments. The CAN-SPAM act is not real - IM(ns)HO it looks more like legislation to protect big-time spammers like Alan Ralsky, since he knows that the majority will never add their e-mail address to this list.
Posted by: Arve | January 22, 2004 01:24 PM
Can you answer a question for me? This morning, when I posted an entry that linked back to this entry of yours, a field in Movable Type’s text entry area that I’ve never used, has a link set up for a ping. It’s some sort of love-productions URL.
Have I done something wrong? Is this simply a case of MT-Trackback doing its thing?
Sorry for the intrusion. I’m just trying to understand why my weblog has pinged you five times today.
Steve
Posted by: Steve Pilgrim | January 22, 2004 01:37 PM
Steve: When commenting to this blog, I noticed that rebuilding was very slow. It’s then highly likely that your trackback ping has timed out when you sent it. When MT times out, it will try to resend the trackback ping the next time the entry containing the trackback ping is rebuilt.
The problem can be relieved by uncommenting and increasing the PingTimeout in mt.cfg. I have mine set to 30 seconds and rarely, if ever, receive timeouts.
Posted by: Arve | January 22, 2004 03:14 PM