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[IP] Personal spam statistic observation




Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 08:37:20 -0500
From: Art Wolinsky <awolinsky@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Personal spam statistic observation
X-Sender: awolinsk@xxxxxxxxxxx
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx

I get between 200-300 pieces of spam a day about a 18 months ago I got a spam filter and trained it over a period of about six months. I got it to the point where is was picking up about 70% of the spam while only erroneously identifying about 1 in 10,000 legitimate messages as spam. Tweaking it any further would raise the number of legitimate messages that got flagged.

After Jan. 1 I noticed that I was getting more spam in my in box and less in the filter. This morning when I checked my accounts 212 pieces of spam got through the filter and only ONE was stopped.

They fall mostly in two categories. The first is the strange spellings and odd characters that would be impossible to effectively train this filter to recognize because of the infinite number of permutations. The second type is very short messages with a single link. There is no way you can train a filter to stop those without erroneously identifying an unacceptable number of legitimate messages as spam.

While I haven't seen a significant change in the number, there is a significant change in the form of the messages. I fear that the amount of spam will rise dramatically as the off-shore spammers increase in number and use these techniques.

The new law has not only worsened the situation, it has rendered my spam filter almost totally useless. I may as well uninstall it to save a few bytes of space on my hard drive.

Art Wolinsky

******************************************************************
 Art Wolinsky
 OII Technology Director      http://oii.org
 awolinsky@xxxxxxx             (609) 597-9481 ext 337
******************************************************************
I am perfectly capable of learning from my mistakes.
I will surely learn a great deal today.
******************************************************************


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