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

[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.