From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-06 19:01:02 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.ems.psu.edu!news.litech.org!news-xfer.cox.net!p01!news2.central.cox.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Ted Dennison User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: [off-topic] spam-filters References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> <4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com> <81NR9.112823$Y86.60750@news2.central.cox.net> <1ciS9.217$Z74.1099@dfw-service2.ext.raytheon.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 02:59:24 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.12.51.201 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cox.net X-Trace: news2.central.cox.net 1041908364 68.12.51.201 (Mon, 06 Jan 2003 21:59:24 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2003 21:59:24 EST Organization: Cox Communications Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32655 Date: 2003-01-07T02:59:24+00:00 List-Id: 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.