
02-05-2004, 02:27 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Maryland
Posts: 541,353
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Lakritze,
We are all suffering from the spam in our in-box. To cut out the junk, some email systems use a technology known as Bayesian filtering to spot and stop spam before it reaches their users' in-boxes. When trained to spot what is spam and what is legitimate mail these smart filters can catch, in many cases, more than 99% of junk messages.
The smart filtering has been so successful that it has already forced a change in the way spam messages are written. Random words are being added to some messages specifically to fool the filters.
These filters are looking for things that are not spammy, words that outweigh the spamminess of the message. This is the reason that many spam messages feature rarely used words such as "formic", "brouhaha", "granitic" and "occlusive". Another feature of this technique is to purposely misspell words and to incorporate unnatural capitalization.
Another problem with this technique is that it can generate false positives, and direct valid email to the trash.
__________________
Eudaimonia
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