Domain Based Spam Prevention?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday January 28, 2004 @02:01AM from the more-tools-for-the-spamfighting-toolbox dept.

aralin asks: "Recently I got this idea and wrote a little perl script to extract all the second (third in case of co.uk) level domains from my last month's collection of spam (some 4000 messages). I ran that against a nameserver to find the ones with NS record (valid domains) and made a list for my procmail filter. I get about 10 mails a day that escape to SpamAssassin for various reasons and since I began to check them against my list of domains I caught half of these. The idea is that if they want to sell something, or put a working web bug in my email, they need to provide a valid url with valid domain. If we filter domains from a URL in confirmed spam, then its almost certain any other email referencing such domain is spam as well. What I wanted to ask Slashdot is whether you know about some software project that already uses this form of spam detection as an addition to rule matching and Bayes filters?"

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Easily Defeated by Tom7 · 2004-01-28 02:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

Again the arms race problem: This might work for a while, but once the spammers see a certain level of blocking, they can adjust their spam to circumvent it.

In this case they could start including (hidden, web-bug style) links to popular webmail sites, like hotmail. If you start blocking all messages with links to hotmail, you are probably going to miss some e-mail that you want!