Thinking about spam filters

[thewayne]

It occurred to me that you could run emails through a spell check, and if more than, say, 20-40% of the words fail, flag it as spam. Or perhaps flag it as stupid, I dunno. :-)

Comments

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

I think flagging it either way would work fine for my purposes. Most of my friends and family spell better than that, so it would be pretty effective.

the one thing I'd have to do is customize it some for the more common colloquialisms that tend to crop up in those conversations. Otherwise, it'd be more likely to let through some of the better-written spam while acting like my sophomore-year English teacher and having a tantrum over poor spelling in the more personal communique.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

It's rare that I open spam, but most of it is so poorly written that I think it could easily make a threshhold. And of course, have a white list, so you can flag certain inept family members to always get through.

I'd also flag the messages that are just a graphic image. I've been getting a lot of "Watch this stock!" emails recently that is just a graphic containing the message.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Being able to add a "friends" list to it would definitely help. And, I agree that most spam lately seems to be of the horribly misspelled variety. It's become a very common approach to avoiding spam filters, especially those looking for things related to sex.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I have my own web server for Spare Brains Games with my own email system. I have the choice of three web interface clients, or I can use programs like Thunderbird or Eudora (or even Outlook **shudder**). The cool thing about this is it has two anti-spam tools, one I don't use as I don't understand it yet, but the other I can turn on and if you send an email to me, it sends one back and says you must click on this link to verify that you're a person. Most spam programs can't do that, in fact, I haven't received a single spam off that account.

It costs me $50 a year to maintain that server.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

$50 a year for that kind of capability is a helluva deal.

A friend of mine has his e-mail account configured the same way, where you have to get his approval in order to actually get stuff to him. That makes a lot of sense to me.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

www.scottsdalehosting.com. Tell 'em Sparebrainsgames.com sent ya and I'll get credit or something.

;-)

I'm about to add another domain and start routing certain email through it. I think that'll be something like six domains I'm running with two active web sites, soon to be four.