All entries for Wednesday 30 May 2007

Spam–filter algorithm rule.

I have observed that behind the spammers almost plausible senders name the underlying sending email address is far more complicated. Because the lists of barred email addresses continued to grow each spam address is only short lived so thousands are machine generated.

My rule: If an email address has truly random characters it is spam.

So spam filters should just pass the fields of email addresses through a password strength test. If the result is strong it should be labelled as spam. (They might like to add a pile of Polish names to the trusted list.)

Robert McGonigle : 30 May 2007 10:36 |  Tags: Spam Spam Filter |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My ISP unleashes loads of SPAM but I must delete it.

Writing about web page http://www.plus.net

My ISP PlusNet, now a BT subsiduary, has unleashed a whole torrent of the vilest SPAM, the sort of stuff that dried up 2 years ago. Their webmail platform was hacked and about 25% of their email addresses were passed to these old-fashioned spammers.

My family’s emails addresses were amongst those that were stolen.
Luckily most of the addresses use a slightly different form of our addresses so I have been able to create rules to filter the great bulk of these.

The ISP is now offering a ‘free service’ to filter SPAM remotely before download. They cannot delete any emails so I still have to clear our the junk. I will be contrasting this with other policies in a later posting but I can understand why this is necessary.

Interestingly PlusNet have moved to SquirrelMail as their webmail platform, the same as our students use here at the University of Warwick. This is yet another example of an open source application that seems to be winning large academic and corporate clients. I will pass this note on to my colleagues at the NB2BC as they are more knowledgeable about the use of open source software by business and track these things closely.

Robert McGonigle : 30 May 2007 10:19 |  Tags: ITS Spam Spam Filters Squirrel Mail Squirrelmail |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem