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Spammers Choose GMail
EdwardLAN writes "A study by Roaring Penguin has discovered that during the past three weeks, the amount of spam originating from Gmail has risen sharply." My spam has been pretty ridiculously high for the last few weeks, although I have no idea if this is part of it. It really does seem like gmail's spam filters are declining these days.
Yeah thats why I mentioned the Cyrillic thing.
In reality doing it via language matching should be pretty trivial. I'd hazard a guess if you had a list of 30 languages and you pulled out the top 50 most common words in each language you'd probably have near 100% success in detecting the primary language in an e-mail. I'm sure an algorithm either purely based on that word set or based on a larger dictionary choosen based on that matching could be done to determine with a very high confidence what language an e-mail is in and if there's more than one or two languages in it.
They also know my white list of contacts. In my case I'd bet 90% of my e-mail comes from them so those can be immediately put in the inbox, reducing the number that need to be scanned at all.
CAPTCHA is broken: it's not just various implementations that are compromised, but the entire theory.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Well, I did this study and our results are here.
We in no way imply that Gmail's inbound spam filtering is bad. It's probably excellent. It's just difficult or impractical for Google to filter outbound mail without either human review or complaints because of false-positives.
What we're saying is that spammers are trying to evade IP reputation systems by hijacking organizations with good reputations or which would be impractical to block. There will be a CAPTCHA-cracking arms-race, but unfortunately I think the system will reach equilibrium with spammers quickly breaking CAPTCHAs and continuing to abuse free e-mail systems.