Dec 19, 2006
Trash Those Penny Stock Spam
May God forgive all the spammers’ souls.
Meanwhile, I use this procmail recipe:
:0B
* ^Symbol: +[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z][A-Z]
* ^Current Price: +\$[0-9]\.
* Term Target( Price)?: +\$
/dev/null
This one recipe alone reduces my daily spam by about half! I get about 500 to 1,000 spam emails daily. This is the only reason I reactivated my procmail. My Bayesian filter, which has been working wonderfully for years now, caught all the penny stock spam just fine, it’s just that it’s really annoying and harder for me to go through these penny stock spam when checking my spam folder for false positives.
Follow
for spamassassin user:
http://www.rulesemporium.com/rules/70_sare_stocks.cf
That will help bumping the score.
what’s far worse is the same spam encoded in image attachment. each of them easily worth more than 80 KB in size. and bayesian filtering doesn’t work as well with these kind of spam.
No, don’t! This pump and dump stock is actually a sweet spot to play with, trust me :). When they tell you to buy the stock, do the opposite, short sell! I have tried this using paper trading and it worked most of the time :P Give those spammers a run for their money hehehe
I forgot to mention that my spam filters are 3 layers: procmail then bayesian, both on the server, then spamassassin on my machine. I try to catch as many spam at the server as possible before it reaches my machine. So unfortunately in my case, mucking with spamassassin would be too late.
I put procmail first because it’s the easiest and probably the lightest, very useful for /dev/null-ing the obvious stuff first before they even reach the heavier filters.