BASE64 [was: various]

[David Relson]

At 10:55 AM 10/23/02, Ben Rosengart wrote:

>On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 09:16:53AM +0200, Boris 'pi' Piwinger wrote:
> > Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> wrote:
> >
> > >As someone (I believe Boris) has pointed out,
> > >spammers won't use base64 to deceive spam traps because that will render
> > >the mail unreadable.
> >
> > I once posted some statistics about the use of base64. To my
> > very surprise it was used by spammers significantly.
>
>I think Matthias' point is that they will use base64, but they will
>also use an honest Content-Transfer-Encoding header, because
>otherwise clients will display the raw base64, which won't sell any
>golf balls or Viagra at all.


My base64 statistics differ significantly from Matthias'.  Here are my 
wordlist entries:

spamlist.db:    base64  5
goodlist.db:    base64  212

So, for my site, base64 is a strong non-spam indicator.