Random musing about words and spam
Steve Furlong
sfurlong at acmenet.net
Thu Sep 4 18:02:30 PDT 2003
On Tuesday 02 September 2003 19:00, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> Spammers recently adopted tactics of using randomly generated words,
> eg. "wryqf", in both the subject and the body of the message.
...
> Could the pseudowords be easily detected by their characteristics,
...
> Presence of pseudowords then could be added as one of spam
> characteristics.
Wouldn't work for me. For one thing, I'm a programmer; as John Kozubik
noted, identifiers in code look a lot like random strings. For another,
I routinely receive email in non-English languages. Not only European
languages, which probably have characteristics close enough to English
to do matching, but also in Chinese and Korean. And Lojban, too, which
itself looks an awful lot like random strings. (And getting legit mail
from .cn and .kr prevents me from just blocking the entire TLDs of
those national spam factories. My life sucks.)
--
Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel
"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!" -- Rep. Henry Waxman
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