Full Speed
[ July 17, 2006 ]
[ October 4, 2005 ]
Bacon Polenta
Google has serious problems. It seems that they have given away a pr10 (Google cache). And Google employee Matt Cutts has been GoogleWashed—-his site has had its content and PR stolen. The event has also been referred to as The Great Bacon Polenta Conspiracy, a name derived from a recent post on Matt Cutts’ blog.
[ April 25, 2004 ]
SpamAssassin Customization
A recent post on MeFi pointed me to some custom rulesets on the SpamAssassin Wiki.
My typical antispam arsenal consists of SpamAssassin plus Eudora’s Bayesian filtering. On a normal day in the past, SpamAssassin (set to a threshold of 6.5) would return around twenty false negatives. Of those twenty, Eudora might catch 75% on a good day. The rest would be marked as spam in hopes of further training the Bayesian filter.
Since installing these new custom rulesets, however, only two spams have gotten past SpamAssassin. Oddly enough, Eudora didn’t catch them either, but that’s beside the point. Any reduction in spam volume means more time for doing other things, so I’m very pleased.
And since these rulesets often change frequently, there’s Rules Du Jour, a bash script that downloads the latest scripts automatically.
[ March 13, 2004 ]
Habeas Spam
Habeas has infiltrated many popular antispam tools with their “Sender Warranted Email”. Nelson described the technique best:
Habeas thought they had a clever idea: copyright a little haiku, consider any mail that has the haiku to be not spam, then sue any spammer who violates their copyright.The problem is that spammers typically don’t care about these lawsuits and have started including this haiku in their messages. After reading Nelson’s post, I examined the spams that had mad it past SpamAssassin, and he was right—-I saw Habeas all over the place. Many others have also noticed this problem.
SpamAssassin gives Habeas a -8 score by default. This is a fair score to give an effective rule, but this rule is obviously failing. So while Nelson recommends giving Habeas a score of 0 in SpamAssassin, effectively removing the rule, I’m giving it a 5, penalizing those who use this haiku: score HABEAS_SWE 5. [via Nelson Minar]
[ February 18, 2004 ]
Advanced Spam Filtering
Brad Choate has a fairly complicated spam filtering setup that’s based on qpsmtpd. After reading his story, I’m very tempted to give qmail another shot.