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Re: Spam and spam filtering, a problem new to me



On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 14:14 -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> Over tha past few weeks, I have started receiving spam email that
> contains text the is all well formed words, but doesn't make sense as
> a spam message, or as any other sort of communication. I think I have
> found what is going on:
> 
> The email *does* contain a message. It is contained in a .gif or .png
> or other image format file. These are not pictures of naked ladies,
> but images of text that touts various penny stocks. If I didn't use
> mutt, I might not have had so much puzzlement over them. I suppose
> with Outlook all the user sees is the image, which is clearly spam,
> but the user doesn't see what the spam filter sees, so, it seems, no
> amount of filter fiddling will protect against this. What to do? Are
> there new filtering techniques beyond spamassassin?

Actually, I've been seeing the same sort of spam. Thus far, no matter
how much I classify it as junk, spamassassin really has not done well
picking it up as junk. These penny stock sma messages have been getting
through with regularity.

I wonder if continually classifying them as spam (manually) can throw
off the filter because of the "legitimate" text that shows up below the
penny-stock gif?

Rick
-- 
Rick's Law: What cannot be imagined will be accomplished by a fool.
PGP Key Id: 9E1125E0

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