Greetings, spamologists! I spent the past four years thinking about email, including spam, while working on a pair of books on how to overcome email overload. Recently, I've been working on a Visual Basic plug-in for MS Outlook (send flames off-list, please, and first note that I'm a Eudora fan) that scores for spam (among other things).
One rule that I didn't see on the SpamAssassin is for I-M-G in the body without an ID code. (Note: The hyphens are there only so that I won't spamfolder your response if you include this message.) I find that images are VERY common in spam but much less common in legitimate messages. If you've got a good whitelist, you can really crank up the penalty and get very good results. I-M-G is in 7,504 (66%) of my most recent 11,346 spams, while only in 35 (0.3%) of 11052 legitimate messages (not counting messages *about* I-M-G tags in email). (Note: I didn't count 20-30 grey-area messages -- Amazon confirmations, Schwab alerts, strangers individually wanting me to do business with them, etc. -- in either category. I also don't get image-ridden newsletters. Newsletters and commercial messages that I asked for are easy to whitelist.) I don't even bother trying to parse to make sure it's an HTML tag: the only English-language word with I-M-G in it is the city Pri.m.ghar, Iowa -- population 950. There are a few acronyms -- Inside Macintosh Games, for example -- but even those are rare. -- Kaitlin Duck Sherwood Author of the _Overcome Email Overload_ series, http://www.OvercomeEmailOverload.com _______________________________________________________________ Have big pipes? SourceForge.net is looking for download mirrors. We supply the hardware. You get the recognition. Email Us: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
