The other day, I wrote a blog post about the possibility of instant message spam filtering. I wondered whether or not there was even a need for instant message spam filtering. Well, just yesterday, I logged into Yahoo Messenger and I got spammed on...

On Friday, Microsoft stock had a golden cross. A golden cross is when a stock's 50-day moving average crosses its 200-day moving average from below. This is usually interpreted as a positive sign for the stock. Conversely, a death cross is when a stock...

This is an idea that I have been thinking about for a while and that is the concept of instant message filtering. I don't get too much spam on my instant messenger (I use or have used ICQ, Yahoo IM, Windows/MSN/Live Messenger, AIM, gaim, and Office...

A couple of years ago, I can remember Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates saying that the problem of spam would be solved by using a reputation-based anti-spam system. Mail would be allowed on the basis of the reputation of the sender. This would work extremely...

We here in Exchange Hosted Services get a lot of traffic over our networks, but it's nothing compared to what they see over in Hotmail. I was talking to some of the guys who do some Hotmail spam filtering and the problems they have are things that we...

I've been away on business the past week which is why my blogging has been sparse as of late. I hope to get back to it more consistently in the next week.

Recently, I stumbled across an email with a flash animation that challenges people at parking a car. It's a computer game and it is kind of fun. I could get to level 4 before I had to move on and get back to work.

This story reminds me of 2005 when Microsoft settled a case against Scott Richter, of opt-in real big, for several million dollars. Spamming may pay well, but if Microsoft ever brings you to court you had pretty much be prepared to give up all of your...

Ever since I started learning how to trade stocks nearly two years, I am amazed at how many applications trading has to real life. Of course, when something doesn't quite fit I simply make my concepts looser until they do fit, but you get the point. ...

Readers of my blog will know that I frequently complain about Yahoo's spam filtering service, Yahoo SpamGuard. They claim to have the best spam filtering around, it was in their email footers. Well, I don't see it in their email footers anymore. I...

Now that election season is starting to heat up (in the United States) I am starting to notice a lot of submissions coming from people that are political in nature. These are usually fundraising letters or "rally-the-troops" emails from the Democratic...

Lately, it has come to my attention that we seem to be seeing a new kind of spam that contains only subject lines and empty body text, or limited body text. These types of spams are tricky in nature because we don't yet know what the deal is. Why would...

One of the things that amuses me (amuse being a relative term, when you analyse spam the bizarre can be amusing) is the way 419ers speak. At least, it used to amuse me. In the spam world, 419 is a short-hand way of classifying a particular category...

It's now September and it's the time of year when students return to school. I remember when I was in school and later on in university, I didn't particularly look forward to September (with the exception of the year before my last year of university...

I have recently been reading about the performance of the stock market on various days of the week. I recently learned that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are negligible in terms of extraordinary performance but that both Mondays and Fridays are very...

About a month or go or so, I was mentioning how I created a search pattern for spam that hit 9 million times in one day. I was quite proud of that and I figured that was the record for spam pattern matching (it was quite specific). Since then, I have...

I just did a search for the topic of stock spam and it turns out that there is a noticeable effect of stock spam and the price of the stock. You can find an article here or another one here . The results, however, are just what I expect - investors...

We have seen how spam and legitimate messages can share common characteristics, and that in order to increase a spam filter's effectiveness it needs to be able to detect the boundaries in the overlap. The last theorem only marginally is related to...

Recall from previous discussions that some spam and non-spam messages can closely resemble each other. While most spam filters can easily detect the email that is obviously spam, many of them have trouble detecting the difference between spam and non...

Theorem 3 is a corollary to Theorem 2 , the two basically go together. One of the things that spam filters must do is catch as much spam as possible. This would be fairly easy if it weren't for the fact that a great deal of spam contains content that...

In the world of spam filtering, a false positive is a message that is flagged as spam when it should not have been. Sometimes these are newsletters, sometimes these are personal messages and other times these are business-related messages. The reason...

The other day I was browsing through my personal email (a free service that claims to have the best spam-filtering around - which they do not) and I noticed that I had a lot of image-only spam. This spam looked virtually identical to the spam that I know...

According to the Spam Curve , the bulk concentration of messages are the ones that contain a lot of spammy content (extremely dirty) or they contain plenty of legitimate content (extremely clean). We all know what dirty messages look like, they contain...

As all Microsoft employees know, in April Microsoft shares gapped down 10% in one day. The preceded to sell of another few dollars and it caught me off-guard -- how does a large-cap like Microsoft experience so much volatility? This past Friday (August...

I got some spam in my personal email account the other day so I took a look at the source to see if we are blocking the same type of mail when we encounter it (ie, is the mail actually the same or is this a new variation). I was surprised to see that...