At 06:38 PM 9/10/2003 -0300, you wrote:
Am I the only list member to be receiving a dozen or more spam messages
every day for viagra, breast enhancement medication, etc, etc? Some of the
messages come with lurid images. The latest was of a teddy bear flashing
his enhanced you know what. Most if not all messages come from known ISPs
such as yahoo, msn, earthlink, and aol whereas the user names are a jumble
of alpha-numeric characters.
Can anyone recommend a spam or message blocker that can be coded to block
any incoming message where the "from address" comprises a jumble of
alpha-mumeric characters?
John:
Well, I've recommended Mailwasher Pro before, and I'm still using it --
must be of some value to me, since I receive over 400 (!) spams per
day. However, what you're specifically requesting would be rather
difficult, since there'd have to be a relatively simple algorithm to
determine the difference between a "jumble" of characters and a meaningful
(to humans) string. (I'm not aware of any such algorithms, but it's a good
exercise for anyone interested in Artificial Intelligence.) However, the
good news is that many of these "jumbled" e-mail addresses have some
invariant part that can be recognized as coming from a known spammer
address. MW Pro flags those, and in all cases, ignores images. In some
instances, I still have to do manual purging -- but with MW Pro, I don't
have to have my optic nerve assaulted by unwanted images.
Garth
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