August 03, 2004
Are we winning the war against spam?
The latest spam that made it to my Inbox looks like this:
sielkundiges
xhdgkcuh`ezapatascratcht
u,_s^.a ph,a.-rm & next-d.~ay sh-'ipp^'ing
nagstoel
etaicurcinch-pounds http://...
In order to get past my antispam software, the spammers now need to disfigure
their message to the point where it's barely legible. When I see this, I
start thinking that maybe we are slowly beginning to win this war...
Now if only we could find a way for these spams not to be sent in the first
place...
Posted by cedric at August 3, 2004 09:55 AM
I'll believe we're winning when even something like this does not get through to my mail box: http://www.chris.com/ascii/art/html/spam.html
To be honest, I'm surprised that no spammer has used this approach (that I'm aware of)...
We're far from winning against spam because most anti-spamming software mistakenly put "legitimate" non-spam e-mails into my Bulk folder. As a result, I'm forced to check my Bulk folder for what could be important e-mail -- an effort that is probably just as time-consuming as deleting spam e-mail from my Inbox folder. :(
Spam bayes has been working pretty well for me. Mind you I don't get huge volumes of spam despite spreading my email address far and wide across the internet.
We're not winning, its just that the spammers have started to lose almost as much as we have. That's not the same as winning, although it might be an intermediate step.