Bayesian Spam avoidance possible hole ?

Posted Sep 18, 2002 6:29 UTC (Wed) by guybar (guest, #798)
Parent article: Spam avoidance techniques

It seems a bit stupid to ask, but what's stoping the spammers from attaching a random scientific/financial/other serious/ article after the actual spam ?

wouldn't this defeat the bayesian techniques described ?

Bayesian Spam avoidance possible hole ?

Posted Apr 15, 2003 4:27 UTC (Tue) by mattknox (guest, #10640) [Link]

Actually, this would not work all that well, unless the spammers chose a document that is in your field. If you get a lot of mail about scripting languages or kernel development, then an article about one of these topics might help spam get through(at least a few times). However, if a random article that you would not normally recieve in the mail was attached, it would do nothing, because the terms would neither look like spam nor like ham. So the only way for spammers to win on this strategy is to find words that are found in mail that goes to a lot of people, and has not appeared in spam yet. This will be, at best, an uphill battle for them.