Second Initial

Who Is Lori Chapman, and Has She Never Heard of SpamAssassin?

You’ve seen me rant before about what the benefit/motivation is to spam a blog’s comments and only link URLs that are legitimate sites such as CNN, providing no pagerank benefit to the spammer.

I’ve got a variant of this rant. Let me start by pasting the Spam Status header line from a recent spam I received:

X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=28.9 required=5.0

Yeah, nearly 29 points! And in case you were wondering, a threshold of five, even though it’s generally the default, is pretty liberal.

Spammers know about things like SpamAssassin. They know how to process their own messages to predict its SpamAssassin score. Why even bother with a message that scores so obscenely high?

And while I’m at it, do yourself a favor—just go ahead and filter anything from Lori Chapman, unless you actually know someone named Lori Chapman, in which case I’ll make my apologies. But personally, I do not know a Lori Chapman beyond my spam box. For some reason, that sender name seems to stand out in my mind an awful lot.

» Posted by ALBj at 01:32 PM (ET)
Category: Rant

Comments

Sorry, due to comment spam abuse, new comments on this entry are closed until I find time to upgrade Movable Type and enable registration and moderation.