In the ebb and flow of spam, I’m definitely on the upswing these last two days. I’ve gone from an average of one message a day slipping through to having 10 slip through today. And in the last 2 hours since I cleaned up my spam trap, I’ve gotten 120 new spams. (i.e. flagged as spam, but low enough scored that they weren’t immediately consigned to oblivion)

Scariest of all, several of the messages which arrived today, came in perfectly clean, one with a -10.4 score from SpamAssassin.

Anyone else seeing this?

update: Looking through my inbox there are three heurisitics which match 90% of the spam that made it through my filters, and only has 3 false positives in the last 10 days.

  • Claim to be sent from Windows
  • I’ve never gotten email from them before
  • Wasn’t to a mailing list. (another 8% were to mailing lists, but so were a whole bunch of messages written on Windows)

Clearly the solution is to block all email that claims to be sent from Windows! This would also cut down on those annoying virus messages as well. (though in truth I would have been bummed to have missed those 3 messages)

More seriously I am thinking about bouncing any message with a SpamAssassin score higher then 2 to my suspicious folder, half way between clean and spam, as looking over my inbox most of the message I really want to see have spam scores of -20 or more.