Gustafson, Tim wrote: > Hello > > One thing I've noticed about almost ALL spam that gets through at this > point is that they have a LOT of misspelled (and obfuscated) words. > > Could SpamAssassin benefit from a filter that would actually check the > spelling of the text parts of the message, and if misspelled words > exceeds, for example, 50%, then we can add a few points to the SPAM > score? Been suggested many times. MANY times.
Some drawbacks to consider: 1) FPs on highly technical mail due to words not known to the spell checker. 2) FPs on email sent by folks of the text-message generation. (OMG did u c he 8 it all!) 3) FPs on email sent by lazy/stupid folks that can't spell. (Translation: management material) 4) relatively quick and easy for spammers to adapt to. 5) Relatively high CPU usage, given the above caveats in accurate. While the "50% misspelled" category restriction handles most cases of 3, it won't deal with 1 or 2. It also makes 4 very easy, all they need to do is insert a book-quote block. Very little spam has over 50% of its words misspelled right now except drug-obfu spam. Those guys will adapt to this in a flash, as they're VERY aggressive about optimizing for SA. (waves at the pharmacorp spammer who is likely reading this.) > I'm not sure how to begin coding this, but I think it should be > pretty easy (using pSpell or aSpell or something) and I think it would > be a very useful tool. I don't think it would be.. IIRC someone actually tried this out in a test/devel kinda way about 2 or 3 years ago.
