MIT Conference Takes Aim at Spam E – mails
Spam filtering software looks for patterns that suggest an e-mail is spam. But the spammers are constantly evading them, finding new ways to arrange text to make the messages unrecognizable as spam.
Yerazunis’ presentation on his CRM114 Discriminator language was a centerpiece of the conference. His filtering technique “hashes” the messages, matching short phrases from the incoming text with phrases that the user previously supplied as example text, catching spam that might not exactly match standard spam text. He claims that the system has higher than 99.9 percent effectiveness; it can be downloaded for free and is compatible with SpamAssassin or other spam-flagging software.
“This thing is even more accurate than humans,” he said.