Dealing with phishing spam

[David Relson]

Hello Lars,

A great question!

Short answer:  Bogofilter works well with phishing messages.

Long answer follows ...

Most words in bogofilter's wordlist have "neutral" scores, i.e.
bogofilter's training has taught it that the words aren't significant
when making the ham/spam determination.

There will be some word differences between the real and the phishing
messages.  With training bogofilter will learn which ones are
significant, i.e. indicate ham/spam.

When phishing message first start appearing, bogofilter typically will
classify them as "ham" (because they seem real).  After training some
of these as spam, bogofilter will start classifying them as "unsure".
Further training shifts the classification to "spam".

The process works (given some time and some training).

HTH,

David

On Fri, 8 Oct 2010 08:22:22 +0200
Lars Clausen wrote:

> Hi Bogofilterers,
> 
> Starting a few months ago, I've been getting a lot of phishing spam  
> that targets common sites like amazon, facebook, ebay and linkedin,  
> all of which I use. The mails are basically copies of what real
> mails from those sites look like, and generally have a lot of text.
> I'm worried that if I train them all as spam, real mail from those
> sites will be marked as spam as well. What are peoples experiences
> with handling phishing with bogofilter? Should something else be
> used instead, and if so, what?
> 
> Thanks,
> -Lars
> 
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