A simple matter of…

Well I’m sure you have all noticed spammers are getting more desperate. Anyone who buys stuff from people sending emails with such mangle text or random phrases is asking to be ripped off.
In fact, as reported by information week, 11% of people admitted to buying things from spam, with 9% ripped off. Shame it wasn’t 11%.

Anyhow, I thought I would write down some ideas I”ve had to reduce spam levels - you never know, I might even code these up sometime!

Idea one is to compare the HTML and text parts of an email. If they disaggree massively, then just bin it. Some emails now have news articles in the txt part but the spam in the HTML.

Idea two is to check the URLs they point to and bin the email if you don’t like them (maybe blacklist countries - possibly via whois lookup).

Idea three is to look for the lack of conjunctions if the email is over a certain length (you don’t want to throw away a short note). This would help to pickup emails which just have a stack of words in them, however care would need to be taken to not thowaway logs etc (hopefully other “good email” rules will get these).