At 16:01 2003-10-20 -0700, Carl B. Constantine wrote:
True enough, but you then either have to run it through further spam
checks to find out if it's truely spam (most likely) or just relegate it
to /dev/null whenever you see a message like this since it's most likely
spam. Right?
Well, if the subject is encoded, the body probably is as well - and if not,
you've got to wonder WHY NOT?
I realize you posed your "which do you use" question at another lister
(though that lister only just now was informed _how_ to decode the string,
so they probably don't have a methodology in place for dealing with these
messages, nor a firm idea as to how effective that really is compared with
any alternative method of doing the same), however, I'll provide some
insight from my own experience:
I myself flag messages based on a number of characteristics - a base64 only
body is one of those characteristics. So is a subject (or From:) header
specifying a foreign-to-me encoding, but that's just because I don't
interract on foreign-to-me language lists, and therefore have no reason to
expect legitimate messages with such encodings.
I _do_not_ flag a message as spam based on any one characteristic - I used
to, but too much snuck through because certain characteristics couldn't be
relied upon as a 100% match. By using a "spammishness" score - built up by
the various contributory bits, I develop a much more positive feel about
the message being spam. This has proven *EXTREMELY* successful for me, and
results in very few false pozzies (and those usually still look like spam -
lots of "look I'm an idiot and use excessive punctuation!" and the like).
I don't presently use any of the recipes which I provided for addressing
the current request, but as I said, I've thought about decoding and
replacing the Subject: with the decoded string (shifting the original
encoded subject to Old-Subject, as per the invocation of formail that I
provided). This means that the message would SUBSEQUENTLY be handled by my
spam filters exactly as it is already (well, with the exception that I
current extract the SUBJECT, FROM, TO, etc headers to variables at the top
of my procmailrc, and presently, the SUBJECT is whatever the original
format of it would be -- I should have ORIGINAL-SUBJECT and SUBJECT
variables to allow for recipes that might care for the difference).
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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