On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Keith Moore wrote:
Rejecting bytes 128-255 as an anti-spam technique is idiotic. If any
noticeable percentage of the Internet started doing this, spammers would
simply stop using those bytes. (Most of them never even started.)
the number of spammers doing this is not a concern. a significant percentage
of spam messages are doing this. and since the messages themselves are
illegally formatted and unlikely to be correctly displayed, it seems perfectly
reasonable to treat them as trash. it's one of the few effective filtering
techniques with zero false positives.
I've got dozens of non-spam emails in my inbox that have raw 8 bit text
embedded in them - both in headers and the body - right now. Some of them
were quite important to me to receive (things like e-ticket airline
itineraries from a _MAJOR_ popular online travel booking company, and
email from my bank). You _most certainly_ have false postives if you block
\200 - \377.
--
Benjamin Franz
"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong."
-- Norm Schryer, Bell Labs