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Old 4th Jun 2007, 18:42
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IO540
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: EuroGA.org
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What is "P****p**** " ?

There is no solid way to recognise junk. It's basically impossible to do. Nowadays, a lot of spam is some innocuous text (taken out of some story book) and attached to it is a GIF within which is the price list for the "medicines" or whatever.

We use a challenge device as the last barrier; this asks the sender to REPLY to a message. Spammers don't receive back anything so they don't reply. However, this system nearly got us kicked off the ISP because we got hit by a clever inter-domain attack which triggered so many challenges it made us look like a spammer...

So, the most recent tweak to our antispam system at work is dumping all "unknown" incoming emails (i.e. which don't appear on our whitelist, or don't match anything on the keyword list) if they have a GIF attached. That removed at least 90% of the required challenges. This will unfortunately dump any email from a previously unknown customer if it has a GIF attached, but this combination is extremely rare. Most normal people never use GIF; they use Jpegs etc for images.

If somebody has an email address that is unusual (not e.g. [email protected] which will always get hit, but which must be retained) then fighting spam is much easier.
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