If you’re wondering about the state of email spam filtering, here’s a relatively positive outlook on the subject.
Rewriting the spam in less spammy language is the only one of these strategies likely to succeed. But this takes a lot of work. It may not even be possible for some spams. How do you rewrite a mortgage spam without using terms like “refinance” (.9612), “lenders” (.9862), or “mortgage” (.9995)? And remember, whatever euphemisms you use, they have to be different from the ones used by every mortgage spammer before you. Surely at this point it would be less work for the spammer to switch to some more legitimate business.
That’s an important consideration. If the only way to get past Bayesian filters is to write spams more cleverly, we’ve made spamming a lot harder, because we’ve shifted the burden of cleverness from the few comparatively smart people who write spamware to the large number of stupider people who write the spams.
Go forth and be enlightened, o fellow sufferer of email spam.
