in reply to Stopping Spam with SpamAssassin

I read it. Looks good. I was thinking about Razor though. It says if spaces are varying, it will stop the mail from matching. I was thinking that why don't they normalize the spacing? Any sequence of whitespace becomes one whitespace and all chars become lower or uppercase. It would make it harder for spammers to slip by.
Now if you could just figure out a easy heuristic to see if a word token looked like an MD5 or SHA string, it would be even harder. Any thoughts?

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

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Re: Re: Stopping Spam with SpamAssassin
by IlyaM (Parson) on Mar 09, 2002 at 17:48 UTC
    Spaces is not the main problem with Razor. The real problem is that it reports too many false postivites. For example I have seen it marking a lot of "good" emails in Bugtraq maillist as spam.

    --
    Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)

[reply]
      1) Even if it normallized spaces, it still wouldn't be able to deal with the random characters/digits that many spammers put at the end of msgs (or sometimes in the subjects) ... so there's not much point in normallizing the spaces.

      2) As I understand it, the problem with false positives is acctually a problem with people poisoning it. It won't call something "spam" unless someone says it's spam, and there are a lot of assholes out there who think it's ammusing to call widely subscribed lists "spam"

      The article makes a good suggestion, don't trust Razor outright, use it as a SpamAssasin rule that contributes to a messages score.

[reply]

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