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[Asrg] Re: 2a. Analysis - Changed patterns in spamming?

2003-11-06 17:12:44
I posted a reply on this subject earlier today, mentioning some analysis
I had done on the spam reaching my spamtraps, which get around 3000
spams per day.

Analysis of the Content-Type charset revealed a sharp (around 95%)
drop in the number of Korean messages around October 1st, but a 
gradual increase in the number of Chinese messages for the last 6
months.

However, in my post I made one mistake - I mentioned the actual
names of the charsets ;-)

This caused the ietf.org spam blocker to kick in and reject my 
message:

   **************** eManager Notification *****************

   The following mail was blocked since it contains sensitive content.

   Source mailbox: <frisk(_at_)f-prot(_dot_)com>
   Destination mailbox(es): asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
   Policy: Non-English Trap
   Action: Quarantine

   To prevent excessive spam abuse, non-English character sets 
   have been blocked at www.ietf.org.  The IETF Secretariat's
   official language of operation is English - although the 
   message you have sent was proper, your mail composer's 
   settings specified an Asian 'charset'  which is widely 
   used by spam abusers.  To permit your message (and confirm
   human response),  please include the keyword:  ' spamcontrol '
   somewhere in your message.  We apologize for any inconvenience
   this may cause.

   ******************* End of message *********************

This is wrong, of course - the message charset was not an asian
one, but the names of several Asian charsets were included in
the message body.  It seems this was enough to trigger the
spam filter - it is not sufficiently intelligent to search only
for the offending charsets within Content-Type.

Slightly off-topic, but a bit funny ;-)

--
Fridrik Skulason   Frisk Software International   phone: +354-540-7400
Author of F-PROT   E-mail: frisk(_at_)f-prot(_dot_)com       fax:   
+354-540-7401


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