Spam! To The EXTREME!

Published on 15 September 2004 in , , ,

It’s been almost a year since I switched on SpamAssassin for the first time. I was rather cautious – setting it up so all spam would go into one folder that I could review and then delete. Just in case anything slipped through.

And so for all that time I’ve been going through the hassle of deleting spam. Yesterday I got fed up.

Looking at the the ratings SpamAssassin marks emails with I noticed a number of emails were well over my 3.5 threshold – many over 15. Could probably delete a few automatically I thought.

But as an experiment I decided to filter anything over 15 to a different

folder – see how many there were.

The results were interesting. In the space of 24 hours, 109

spams were marked as over 15 and 45 less. So in actual fact, two thirds

of my spam wasn’t even trying to hide the fact it was spam.

Some spammers are constantly trying to come up with new tricks to outwit spam protection programmes, but it seems most haven’t even got that far.

That bit of fun done, it’s time to stop saving all the emails to a different folder and send them off where they belong – the dark void of /dev/null…