Tough Spam

As good as spam filters have gotten - spammers seem to keep crafting messages that are tougher and tougher to detect. As the author of SpamButcher, I should know. SpamButcher is available as a free anti-spam download from www.spambutcher.com.

Emails with multiple tracking images linking back to ".biz" and ".info" sites set of flags in most well written filters. That message with "enlarge your p3n1s..." in the title? It's not fooling most systems to block junk email.

The ones that are really hard to identify look something like the following :

Hi Jim,
It was good talking to you the other day. Here's the website I mentioned: (etc...)

So 1 in 300 users gets suckered into visiting a website. Is that really making anyone any money? They seem to keep coming in - so presumably they may be.
One way to detect messages like these is to rely on the information in the message headers regarding its source. A message from a known spamming server or network is more likely to be spam itself.

This has recently become much more problematic with the proliferation of spammers using compromised PC's to send spam for them. Spammers increasingly are using software that identifies hacked systems, then uses them for sending junk email. This helps get past spam mail stoppers that use DNS blacklists.

By default, SpamButcher doesn't use DNS blacklists, but can optionally be configured to do so. Using them generally does increase the effectiveness of the e-mail spam filter by a small amount.

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