February 2009 - Posts
This past week, I invented a new game at the office, and I also play it at home. Don't laugh when you read this, it's great for increasing your concentration and manual dexterity. It's called "How many cards can you toss into a basket."
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Note: this post contains some explicit language relating to stuff commonly found in spam. One of the very basic ways of fighting spam is with content filtering. At a basic level, you look in the content of an email searching for words, patterns and phrases
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One of the ideas for a series that has been floating about in my head for a long time is the idea of fighting spam in foreign languages. Now, while I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, unfortunately, the foreign languages common to
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We all know about Microsoft's automatic spell check feature. It's that handy-dandy feature that converts things like teh to the . In other words, it finds common misspellings of words that occur frequently in the English language, usually
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As someone who fights spam, as opposed to the rest of the population, I am actually interested in seeing the type of spam that gets to my junk mail folder. From time to time I will go through it and say "Hmm, which of our spam rules blocked
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The other day, I stumbled across a handy-dandy table on the Internet somewhere that has a list of IP ranges and the country that they are reserved for. Just for fun, I wrote a script that lets me enter in an IP and then the country where it is assigned
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Spam Fighting organization KnujOn (pronounced new-jon, or No Junk backwards) is a small company dedicated to going after and exposing spam friendly registrars. When you're a spammer and you need to register a new domain, you go to a registrar. GoDaddy
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Regular expressions are a tricky thing to pick up. The ability to write them well is a skill that takes a while to develop. We recently hired a bunch of people in, oh, let's say London. They were visiting here for a while learning the system
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Ever since I started working as a spam analyst, there has been an abundance of people that I know that write the word as "SPAM" instead of "spam." At first I thought that it was simply annoying. Now, I know that it is technically
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