Spam avoidance techniques

Posted Sep 12, 2002 4:12 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)
Parent article: Spam avoidance techniques

It's certainly reasonable to combine multiple anti-spam techniques, in fact, a lot of people do exactly this.

Obviously, a lot of people only learned about this technique from Paul Graham's plan for spam (a well-written piece!). The LWN study shown here is wonderful confirmation that it has value. It's worth noting that there have been other studies on the topic, including An evaluation of Naive Bayesian anti-spam filtering, An Experimental Comparison of Naive Bayesian and Keyword-Based Anti-Spam Filtering with Personal E-mail Messages, Learning to Filter Spam E-Mail: A Comparison of a Naive Bayesian and a Memory-Based Approach, and information from lsi.upc.es and monmouth.edu; Slashdot has carried a discussion about it. Ifile implemented the idea many years ago - it claims a first release date of Aug 3 20:49:01 EDT 1996, and the author doesn't claim that this program is the first implementation of the idea, either.

A selected set from the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.sightings might be useful for initial training of a spam filter. That would eliminate the problem you mention.

I think every email reader should have a "big SPAM button" that adds an email to the "spam" folder (so it can be used for future analysis), as well as other configurable actions. See http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/stopspam.html for more information about this.