I would *adore* seeing a Vlad novel in which he is contracted to murder a "professional" spammer. - T ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Silberstein" <davids at Kithrup.COM> To: "Dragaera List" <dragaera at dragaera.info> Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 10:29 PM 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. >