Sex is a common word to block in spam. So sexy would do it to. -----Original Message----- From: David Silberstein [mailto:davids at Kithrup.COM] Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 10:29 PM To: Dragaera List Subject: Re: what, me spamming? On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: >How peculiar. Why would my quote of one verse of Maya Bohnhoff's >"Bimbo on the Cover of the Book" be considered spam? > I strongly suspect that the antispam engine can be tuned to filter on the mere presence of certain keywords. Certainly, my procmailrc does, although I do whitelist testing before bad keyword testing. So I think there mere presence of the words "blond", "sexy", and "bimbo" set off all of its alarms. While I am sure that you would never use those words to market what might be called certain services, or images of certain persons, or images of certain persons performing certain services, spammers are far less scrupulous. If this e-mail that I send now gets bounced in the exact same manner, I nearly think that we shall have discovered that those keywords are indeed the problem. If that is the case, you might want to make a note to use some of the same tricks that spammers use in these situations, that is, to mangle the words so that they no longer match what the spam filter searches for; eg: "bl*nd", "sehxii", and "b1mb*". Alas that such measures are called for. Truly, the spammers are purest evil.