Re: Uncompressing gif Files that May or May Not be gif's
Andrew Sackville-West writes:
> 1) don't quote spam on this list.
I do apologize for doing that. I was hoping someone
might recognize the style of the junk and know some really good
way to make it go away. If I hadn't said it was spam, it looks
just like a malfunction which, I guess, it is in a way. That's
what makes these particular ones so hard to filter out. Other
than the fact that our brains quickly catch on to the fact that
this is garbage, it is all excerpted from legitimate text that
existed on the victim's computer so a language filter would have
to be very smart to reject it.
> 2) if you're worried about detecting viruses and dumping them (not a
> bad idea as they account for a reasonable portion of spam), then
> use an av setup like clamav. I run clamav on my local mailserver
> and if it hits a virus, blackholes it. I never see it and I've
> probably cut my spam by 15% or so without ever looking for "spam".
Excellent suggestion.
> 3) it is fairly trivial to flag all messages with a .gif attachment as
> spam and chuck it in the right box. bogofilter is not the way to do
> that though. Even something like a procmail rule may
> suffice. certainly, various configs in your MTA could handle
> attachments.
That's where it gets interesting. Here where I work, we
have Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, etc. About 2 to 3 of every 5
work-related messages contain .gif files, some of which are
pictures or maps with most being someone's signature or some
other little flourish that they want to attach to their message.
It's still a .gif, however, so probably 2/3 of my work messages
would end up in the spam folder were I to do that.
Right now, a mixture of bogofilter and .procmailrc rules
snags around 90% of the junk. I have received 10,300+ spams of
all kinds since New Year's Eve when I started counting to see
just how many spams I receive. It's about 250 messages per day.
if 10% get to one's inbox, that's still quite a waste of time. I
wanted to make sure there wasn't something completely unknown
that I was missing out on.
Thanks for all constructive suggestions.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
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