Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 23:51:19 -0400 (EDT) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> Subject: [WSFA] Re: "Chuck Taylor" Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> > Gosh, I just received an email from the son of Charles Taylor of Liberia. > It's all in caps. > Hmmmmmm, wonder if it's legit . . . . <g> Careful about naming African nations. I've been adding the names of more countries to my filters. Those "Spanish Prisoner" or rather "Son of Deposed Dictator" spams are the most difficult kind of spams to filter out, since they are all phrased slightly differently, and come from different ISPs. "Five reports" chain letters are more common, but are very easy to filter, since they're all near-identical copies of each other. 98% of them contain "hanks to the computer age and the Internet". (With all these phrases, I'm leaving off the first letter, so that *this* email won't be blocked.) Yesterday my filters blocked 502 emails containing that phrase. Other rules got the remaining few, so not a single chain letter got through. As for rules intended to block the African scam spams, my count for yesterday is: 57 igeria 8 ierra leone 6 imbabwe 6 obert mugabe 6 ongo 5 urprise to you 5 voir 4 rgent and very confidential 4 avimbi 3 rgent business 3 rgent and confidential 3 equest for assistance 2 trictly confidential 1 olicit your strictest confidence 1 eliable and trustworthy 1 each you as a surprise 1 ank of africa 1 god fearing person 1 frican development bank (Each spam is listed only once, even if it would have flunked multiple rules.) I see that I got two which mentioned Liberia which were not blocked. (Of course I don't know how many that *were* blocked mentioned that country.) With that few, it's not worth blocking all email which mentions that nation. I wish I didn't have to block anything. But that's no longer practical, thanks ot the utterly insane amounts of spam being sent. Several spammers boast of sending over a *billion* spams every day. The rule the blocked the most spams of all was the one excluding all HTML email. That blocked 1369 spams from my mailbox yesterday. -- Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/ I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.