Graham's spam filter

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Thu Aug 22 17:43:02 EDT 2002


Neale Pickett wrote:

> One thing you *should* do, though, is skip base64-encoded stuff.  That
> will just clutter up your database.

This is another example of where such a database won't work.  A fair
number of (clever) spammers send the entire body of their message
encoded with base64, so that none of it is readable text.  The spam
filter either has to have some special rules for this case, or decode
the base64 data and then proceed with that.  Otherwise, just by ignoring
base64 data, an otherwise apparently innocuous message could easily get
through the filter.

-- 
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