>> The messages are simply a random stream of words, with punctuation >> scattered in them. No HTML, no URLs being advertised, no excessive >> capitalisation, just meaningless text. > > Technically, then, it's not spam. Spam requires a commercial message > of some sort. :)
Yeah, I think I said 'junk' rather than spam. I wonder if such mail has a name? > I would agree that it's an attempt to poison your bayes database, > assuming that you have autolearn turned on, either by skewing the > scores towards ham or by bloating the database. Do you think the perpetrators are poisoning the bayes db with a view to sending spam at a later date? We aren't a big organisation - few hundred mail boxes - so it seems rather long lengths for a spammer to go to. Another suggestion was that the spammer had intended to attach an image, which hadn't got through. Given the technical competence of many spammers, it seems more likely they screwed up and forgot to attach the image. But I'm just guessing here. >> Any thoughts on what I can do about these messages? Even with >> bayes turned off, they would still fail to score more than say 2 >> or 3. Each message contains a different paragraph of random text, >> so it's not possible to pick out keywords; and the messages are >> coming from dialup machines, so blocking IP isn't going to be very >> effective. > > Look for punctuation? A good deal of the random bayes poison at one > time was totally without punctuation. I'm cautious about feeding these messages to sa-learn as spam, in case it has a negative impact on genuine messages. The punctuation is pretty good - full stops every dozen words or so, the odd comma. In fact, it's probably better punctuation than most of my users use:) At the moment I'm just black-listing host or netblocks which this junk is coming from. Apologies for not setting a subject in my original mail by the way Peter Smith
