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Terry Zink's Anti-spam Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet

April 2007 - Posts

A couple of more chinks in Gmail's armour?
In the last few weeks, I've noticed that my Gmail account is getting more spam than it used to. Granted, it's maybe 1 or 2 per week but that's still more than the zero that everybody says it is. In the past couple of days, I've noticed some spam getting Read More...
Pre-emptive filtering
An idea that has been floating around in my head for several months is the idea of using probability to pre-emptively mark messages as spam from IPs that we have never seen before. Spammers are getting clever; because they know that a lot of companies Read More...
Note to MessageLabs... a little help?
This post is for any of my MessageLabs readers. I tried to send an email to my travel company today using my Gmail account (which I pop through Thunderbird). I got an NDR saying the following: This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification Read More...
A trip to Spamatopia - part 5
Returning back to the tales of my trip to Spamatopia, recall that I left the land of Fauxpharm where I couldn't understand a word that anybody there said. I had already visited Pumpenstach and Virus Valley. I only had time to visit one more place in detail, Read More...
What constitutes a good sender?
Lately, I have tasked myself with the enormous challenge of the automation (or partially automation) of processing all of our false positive submissions. For years I have always thought that false positive processing would require hand processing. Because Read More...
Strange new spam
There's a new spam going round that we started seeing last Friday. The subject line consists of a (seemingly) random string of characters composed of uppercase letters and numbers, and the body text contains two words: Hillo<number> followed by Read More...
Buy stuff from Apple
Before being bought out by Microsoft, a lot of my co-workers bought stuff from Apple (mostly mac laptops, but also iMacs). I recently bought an iBook second hand, but in my team of 8 people, 4 have bought new Macbooks in the past 4 months. A few people Read More...
Can a computer fight spam better than a human, part II
Leaving aside the question of email authentication for the time being, is it possible for a computer to recognize spam the way a human does? Even when it comes to human verification of the contents of spam, even we use heuristics to make quick judgements. Read More...
Can a computer fight spam better than a human?
In this blog, I sometimes try to point out the similarities between stock trading and spam fighting. I happen to trade stocks (but never take tips I receive by email, not even in The Motley Fool) and I find that the two activities have things in common. Read More...
Can spam be used as a leading stock market indicator?
I was going over some of my stock charts last night when I thought to myself "Could the amount of spam hitting my inbox be used as an indicator of which way the market is going to move?" In stock speculation, there are two types of indicators - confirmation Read More...
The top anti-spam blogs
I read a few other anti-spam blogs. There really are some good ones out there so I thought I'd share my top three. Al Iverson's Spam Resource - This is perhaps my favourite blog because the author, Al Iverson, so frequently has interesting information Read More...
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