July 01, 2003
The Spammiest Spam
Inspired by Evhead's note I looked at all the spam I've received since May 13, 2003 (a whopping 124.4 MB worth) and this is the spammiest spam of them all (out 18,298 pieces of spam), weighing in with 59.5 points scored against it using SpamAssassin's rating mechanism. Be sure to check out the X-Spam headers.
The crazy thing is the spammer wrote the spam in Microsoft Front Page and then encoded it using Base64 encoding. No one claimed spammers were very intelligent.
Those 18,298 pieces of spam total 2,615,718 lines of text. Whew, almost enough to make a piece of Microsoft software.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at July 1, 2003 10:25 PMIn my earlier days on the web, particularly AOL, and particularly when I used to spend time in conference rooms, I'd find I recieved upwards of ten unsolicited emails everyday. Now, however, I have the situation under control. Whenever I recieve a new spam, I automatically block the sender. It doesn't seem like much, but often they'll use the same name over and over, and if your name lists as undeliverable, they'll take you off the list to save time. That, and generally using a Hotmail account when signing up for things that generate spam will cut back on a lot of the stuff. Sometimes, though, you have to get creative. At one point I set up a blocking mechanism that automatically deleted every mail containing the words penis, porn, mortgage, credit, and lesbian. You'd be surprised how much spam disappeared overnight. ;-)
Posted by: Kerri at July 1, 2003 11:15 PM
Cam,
You're still lagging behind our top dog over at Project SpamSearch. A whopping 71.60 was registered a while back with over 41k SPAM caught by SpamAssassin in just under a month by those who are submitting.
http://zebulon.miester.org/spam/
--Joe
ps. This project is going to get a facelift shortly under the name SpamChart.
Posted by: joestump at July 2, 2003 08:28 AM
I carefuly built my spamvault list up to about 300 entries which reduced spam by about 99% into my account. A few days ago I was messing with some configuration settings and wiped all my entries. 5 minutes later the spamgates opened and I had to start all over :(
Will we ever beat the spammers?
Posted by: Joe at July 3, 2003 07:31 AM
You may want to check out a bayesian spam filter. The software uses examples from your own system in order to determine what you want to keep and what you don't want to see. The open source version of this can be found at www.spambayes.org. The commercial Version for outlook can be found at http://www.inboxer.com along with a bunch of information on the technology.
Posted by: Laura Strassman at July 22, 2003 07:40 AM
