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Simpler simply..
Authored by: charles a on Jun 19, '02 01:33:43PM

To kill 95% of spam:
1) create your "whitelist" filters - allow through stuff from mailing lists (which won't be addressed directly to you but which you want to see)
2) create filter to delete anything which doesn't have your *exact* address in the To: or Cc: fields.

3) complain like hell about the ones that get through. (They will, unfortunately.)

This is much faster than any filtering system which examines the body of the mail, which could be enormous. Also, spammers are getting wise: I saw a spam today in HTML which ran "to uns<!---mine--->ubscribe from th<!-- mine -->is list...
You'd miss them on body scanning for words like "unsubscribe".
Various other header checks, such as binning stuff from .kr, .cn, .jp (though excluding whitelist above) are getting pretty useful too nowadays.

Does this work? Sure. I have about 5 very public addresses, get 200 emails a day, and I get about 3-4 "beat the filter" spams per day. Those, I take some work to kill the spammer.
That 200 emails figure, BTW, is why I don't do tests on the content of the mail. Too large, too slow.



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