The Next Step In Spam Filtering

simeonbeta2 writes "Paul Graham (of "A Plan for Spam" fame) has a couple of new articles up. The first one details the success of Bayesian spam filters despite various circumvention techniques by spammers. While the success of Bayesian spam filtering is encouraging, it certainly hasn't seemed to stem the flow of spam in the last year or so. His second article, however, suggests finally taking the anti-spam battle to the spammers! Paul proposes that spam filtering packages automatically spider links contained in probable spam. Not only will this increase the accuracy of filters (by running the retrieved content through the spam filter as well) but this would effectively be a massive distributed DOS attack on spammers. This isn't a new idea nor is it without its problems but I think it's definitely an idea whose time has come."

Comments

Re:Are these subject lines example's of anti BF?

[Sheetrock]

The recognizable words (neonatal, pedant, betsy) might be a weak attempt at that in addition to creating non-identical subjects, although they'd need a lot more non-spammy words buried in the article to get through... which they usually do, surrounded with HTML to make them invisible.

Re:Boston Globe Article

[hackhound]

Correct, clickable link here: Boston Globe

Re:What about false positives?

[(54)T-Dub]

From the FAQ :

This could be used to DoS innocent victims.

That's the point of the blacklist. A site doesn't get pounded simply by being mentioned in a spam. It has to be mentioned in a spam and be on the blacklist.