cellio | quote, link, spam

Quote of the day: "[Pushing data from Perl to Excel is] sort of like when you've been trying to get two acquaintances to meet and talk to each other, but there's all these mishaps that occur, and finally, they talk, and get along pretty well, until one day one realizes that the other one talks too fucking much and segfaults in their face." (

dr4b, here)

ISN: Clark defends domestic psi-surveilance program (by osewalrus).

I keep getting spam claiming to be my "last chance" for the offer du jour. I don't think that phrase means what they think it means. The amount of spam reaching my mailbox has gone down, but the amount that's trying to get there is up again after a dip for a few weeks. I have four layers of protection; since the beginning of Shabbat (two days) the statistics are:

Bounced by pobox.com on my behalf: about 475
Held by pobox.com as suspicious (all actual spam): about 60
Caught by SpamAssassin as almost certainsly spam (score 7+): about 120
Caught by SpamAssassin as probably spam but worth looking 'cause sometimes it catches legitimate mail (score 5+): about 40
Made it to my inbox: about 50

Currently I skim the pobox bounce reports every few days because I toughened the rules a week or so ago, but obviously that's not viable long-term. (I check the "held" pile every couple days; that catches legitimate mail occasionally, but then I can whitelist those senders.) Some of the obvious spam that gets all the way through has low SpamAssassin scores (2 or 3); I'm not sure how they're pulling that off, but dropping the threshold that low would catch way too much legitimate mail. I don't know if better tuning of all the parameters is possible, but so far pobox is doing the bulk of the work and only rarely catching legitimate mail (in the "held" pile, where I can get it back).

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

After a bit of training, both Evolution (which uses SpamAssassin behind the scenes, but trains its Bayes network) and Mail.app do a really good job of detecting spam.

Are those applications or services?

My mail goes through pobox.com first (redirection) and thence to the spool on a Unix box, where I read it with pine. I have procmail available. Can either of the options you mentioned fit into that pipeline?

Evolution is a GUI mailer for Unix; Mail.app is the mail program that comes with OS X.

But you can hook up a personal SpamAssassin setup with procmail, then save your spam and train it periodically with sa-learn; this will be much more reliable than an untrained SpamAssassin like most ISPs use. IIRC the Mail::SpamAssassin docs tell you how to do this.

Y'know, my inner B5 geek really wanted Clark (http://www.clark04.com/) to win the 2004 election.

There was a certain amount of snarking after the election, in the groups I'm in, that the real President Clark had won.

I'm trying to figure out what I did to cause a spam spike, because my spam had been at a constant level in Gmail, and all of a sudden, it's spiked up to almost double what it was. Fortunately, I'm not getting much of a false-positive problem, except for one help board which I never read, which is getting a few messages a day bounced unexpectedly. (I am getting tired of "not spam"-ming them each day.)

That said, my spam folder only had about 450 messages over the last 30 days, so I'm not having major problems...but the doubling in a couple of weeks is a little worrying. And, I'm surprised it's that low, because that is my Gmail address + my old ISP mail that gets re-directed (less that caught by old ISP's spam filter) + any mail sent to an address in the [myrealname].ca domain.

+ my LiveJournal address. I knew I was forgetting one.

Telescammers are similar. There's one repeated caller that leaves messages on my answering machine trying to create the impression that they're my mortgage company and saying this is my "last chance" to accept their offer to refinance. The message also says that if I don't want to get any more calls, I should press a certain button on my phone (which they expect me to believe will magically put me on their do-not-call list).

The a(S)cension of the ordinary man. The as(C)ension of the ordinary man. The ascension (O)f the ordinary man. The ascension of the o(R)dinary man. The as(C)ension of the ordinary man. The ascension of t(H)e ordinary man. The ascension of th(E) ordinary man. The ascension of the or(D)inary man. The ascension of the ordinary man. Th(E) ascension of the ordinary man. The (A)scension of the ordinary man. The ascension of the o(R)dinary man. The ascension of (T)he ordinary man. The ascension of t(H)e ordinary man. The ascension of the ordinary man.

Rob of UnSpace (http://www.unspace.net/)

Y'know, it takes a certain level of intelligence to declare one's evil intentions before doing them. :-)

I had similar thoughts too, though I also found myself thinking that we had two Clarks running, one declared and one not.

I've gotten several calls from people alleging to be returning my calls about mortgages etc (I guess they're running a couple years behind the email spammers), but so far I haven't gotten the "last chance" ploy. It would be tempting to keep one of those recordings and then make a fraud claim against them when they call again. :-) (Note that I said "tempting", not "effective".)

Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this.. but I have a huge crush on you. I have never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was. I'm really attracted to you and I think you would be wanting to get with *Read FULL Card Here* http://hornylove.unudulmaz.com

quote, link, spam

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President Clark

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A Note From The Desk Of President Bush

Re: A Note From The Desk Of President Bush

Re: President Clark

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