On Tue Jan 13, 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Lately my spam folder has been filling with missives from authors with
> the funniest names . . . Is this some ruse to trick spam filters? If
> so, it's not working very well.
It actually works surprisingly well on some systems. Up until a couple months ago, I had Spamassassin set to 5.0, the default setting. It was doing a great job of filtering out 98% of the spam. And then suddenly this stuff started trickling in and soon became a flood. It turns that, by not setting off any alarm bells in the header or subject zones, and only setting them off in the body search, this stuff was managing to get a score between 4 and 5, and thus limbo under the bar.
Of course that's fixed by lowering the bar. But a lot of extremely non-techy people are now using anti-spam software, and probably some don't know how to do that.
I guess since any non-prohibited words found in the dictionary will suffice for this trick, some spammers decided why not amuse themselves.
Michael