I don’t feel like I’ve passed on anything about spam for at least half an hour so here goes. ActiveState, “the leader in enterprise email management software”, has released an ActiveState Field Guide to Spam, which details advanced tricks used by spammers to hide their messages from spam filters.
Regular readers of this blog — or folk who spend their weekends inspecting spam — will be familiar with most of these tricks, but it’s an education nonetheless. However, I am beginning to think that however clever spammers are, there’s a point beyond which it’s just not worth the effort for them. That’s when we all get Bayesian filters running and tune them. The only spam I worry about these days are press releases like this one from ActiveState. I swear it’s taken me longer to find the right link to their website than it would be to clean the one or two bits of spam that get past by my spamblocker (POPFile, in case you haven’t been paying attention). Or am I missing something?