Graham's spam filter

[Erik Max Francis]

Aaron Swartz wrote:

> I've been using bogofilter[1], Eric Raymond's Graham-derived spam
> filter which threw away base64-encoded data and 90% of all spam that
> got past the filter was base64-encoded. Therefore, I think that base64
> content really needs to be decoded. I wrote a base64-decoding filter
> in Python for it and the problem has gone away.

Indeed.  I've been finding very much the same thing with my rule-based
filter; about 90% of the spam that's getting through is base64 encoded. 
I haven't yet taken the next step of automatically decoding the base64
text parts (and then just processing that), but as you have discovered
it is an obvious solution to the obvious problem.

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