August 2006 - Posts
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
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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
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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 who
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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 the
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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-spam
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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In the below post on the Spam Curve , I explained a little bit about what the curve is and the nature of what it represents. In the next series of posts, I will outline what I call “The Spam Theorems.” The Spam Theorems are my own logical conclusions
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I have a theory about the nature of spam and non-spam. Spam and non-spam, in terms of their legitimacy, are at different ends of the spectrum. They do not share very many characteristics that are similar, for the most part. However, there is still that
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I have changed my blog a little bit to greater reflect what it actually is. Whereas before the blog was called "The Exchange Hosted Services - Spam Team Blog" now it is called "Terry Zink's Spam Team Blog." It is not an official blog by the spam team,
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In the next little while, my role as a spam analyst is going to be transitioning from analysis to a more research role. Some of my duties will involve researchings trends. I am a part-time stock speculator (very amateur... I am not making a fortune but
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As an amateur magician with no intention of ever turning pro, I enjoy seeing new and creative magic acts. I came across this one today; it's very good. These quick-change artists are among the best I have ever seen.
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This is from the "Well, obviously" file, but as we all know, spam volume is on the rise. Everybody on the spam team knows this but we didn't really get a handle on just how much it has risen until I saw some internal statistics. I took a look at a certain-domain-that-we-filters'
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From time to time I come across amusing or interesting content as part of my spam processing. The following video is one such amusing web page / video that I have had the pleasure of coming across. Enjoy.
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Viagra spam continues to be the most uniquely spammed product. By unique, what I mean is if you take a specific product, be it a Rolex, mortgage refinance or university degree, Viagra occurs more often than any other product. I never realized how much
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Around Christmas time, one of the most common, if not the most common type of spam is rolex watch spam. Spammers from all around the world spam our inboxes advertising knock-off replica watches. Breitling, Rolex, Tag... I am surprised that I managed to
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I'm currently experiencing writer's block when it comes to writing about spam so I thought I'd post my thoughts on the recent action of Microsoft's share price. One thing companies do to encourage employees to stick around is offer them shares or stock
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Since I've been here for two years, I have noticed that the way spammers irritate us has evolved from a lot of text-based stuff to relying on image-based spam. However, one thing that has remained fairly consistent is the amount of time a lot of spam
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