How to avoid s p lit up wor ds?

[Matthias Andree]

Chris Wilkes <cwilkes-bf at ladro.com> writes:

> Check out TMDA at http://tmda.net/ ... if you're not in a whitelist
> you'll get an email back asking you to respond to it saying that you're
> not an evil spammer and such.  Its all done through tags in the Reply to
> that TMDA sends out to unknowns and it updating its white/black lists.
> Pretty neat.

TMDA has one major and some minor drawbacks:

1. it improves latency. The sender cannot just hit & run, but will need
   to acknowledge the mail. It may then arrive the Monday when it should
   have reached you before the week-end.  It takes the real-time
   approach out of email.  I can only recommend people to put note about
   the message-confirm procedure in their signature. (Major)

Minor:

2. it pollutes semi-automatic address books, such as lbdb. (www.spinnaker.de)

3. it won't work smoothly if you need to put it AFTER POP3 retrieval.

> However things like people sending computer code could get a bad rank as
> they use a lot of single letter variables.  Course in a spam you're not
> likely to see a "#define" either (is that 'define' after the lexer gets
> through with it?).

Ask bogolexer, it shall tell you :-)

(Yes, it is "define").

> A number count of SHOUTING WORDS might be handy too.  I think the
> current idea of lowercasing words is great and reduces the word count,
> but maybe keeping track off all uppercased words might produce some
> benefit.

But that's what SpamAssassin does, it counts "LINES OF YELLING", and for
this African finance junk, it's often enough purely upper case.

> And hey look at this spam I just got, and like 95% of my spam its an
> HTML one that I can't read without hitting a couple of keys (thank
> you mutt!):
>   Burn F_a_t,  Build  M u s c l e.

Ha! You just admitted you haven't configured your .mailcap! :->

Seriously, I have mutt pipe through lynx -dump, but that's not making
spam any less spammish -- IF i get to see it at all, that is.

-- 
Matthias Andree