Marco> Graham answered the same thing as you:
>>> I would not worry too much about spammers appending customized
>>> text. They might append random text, or the same text to every
>>> email, but anything that requires them to treat each recipient
>>> individually is too expensive for them.
Marco> However, I'm not sure yet about this. If one contributes often to
Marco> a mailing list, how much hassle it is to automatically append a
Marco> different real message from that list archives to each spam? They
Marco> could also do this on a list basis. What do you think?
A number of things come to mind:
1. Most people have little or no persistent public presence on the
net other than sending/receiving email. (The members of this
list probably represent a small minority of net users.) For
example, I just googled for my wife's email address. It
returned nothing. Still, she does get some spam. Her email
address was probably sucked into spam email collections by
dictionary search (guessing email addresses - her username is
"ellen") or by a worm/virus harvesting email addresses out of
address books. That suggests that looking for suitable
per-email text will not pay off.
2. Bandwidth is still fairly expensive. Spammers probably consume
most of their existing bandwidth sending out mail. Reducing
the outflow of email will lower their overall revenues. Adding
more bandwidth so they can search for hammy text to associate
with email addresses is expensive.
3. As I mentioned before, static text won't cut it. If they add
The normal flow of control is when you fall out the bottom
of the loop when your control test goes false. Breaking
out of the middle is indeed an exceptional circumstance; it
is an exception to the normal flow of control. People tend
to think of exceptions as errors, but they don't have to
be.
to each spam message they send to skip(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com I will
quickly train
on the few false negatives that slip through and shift the spamprob
of each of the hammy words in the paragraph in the direction of spam.
That paragraph will cease to be effective and the spammer will have
to find a new one.
--
Skip Montanaro
Got gigs? http://www.musi-cal.com/submit.html
Got spam? http://spambayes.sf.net/
skip(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com
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