Re: [off-topic] spam-filters

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:
> Actually, most spam these days are short HTML messages with little or no
> text. There isn't much load on the server from them. Simply blocking
> HTML graphics gets rid of many of them. 

That's right. So are many of the newer email viruses. One nasty thing 
about the HTML messages is that they often contain 1 pixel images, whose 
only purpose is to serve as a trojan to get your email tool to hit their 
website, so that they know they've got a good address. Another really 
nice thing about the Mozilla mail tool is that it lets you disable 
picture references in email, along with Java and Javascript (all of 
which I've done).

If you want, you can also set the browser to not fetch pictures from 
separate servers, or from your own blacklist of servers, which can get 
rid of a lot of banner adds. I don't do that (my favorite websites have 
to pay the bills, after all), but some folk do. The option's yours.

> Also, a lot of spam is now
> encoded in various ways so that simple text filters can't find them.

A baesean filter would almost certianly catch such things, unless its 
somehow worded to look exactly like your normal correspondence (in which 
case, *you'd* have trouble noticing the difference too). However, 
because of the need for personal guidance, it isn't really appropriate 
for server-side filtering like you were talking about (unless you have a 
1 person server, or don't mind someone reading everyone else's mail). 
See http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html for details on how it works.