[SC-Help] Re: Spammers getting smarter?

[Mike Easter]

Geoff Lane wrote:
> However, yesterday I found a message in my spam bin where looking at
> the raw text didn't work. The body of the message was one line,
> "Here's someone you might like to see!" accompanied by an inline
> image.

Without seeing the complete item, I can't say this with certainty;  but
I'm almost sure that item would've never been tagged by my SP
configuration;  unless your niece's IP is on some kind of spamsource or
proxy/trojan list.

I think I am going to be critical of how you have your SP configured.
It is tagging too much good mail.

If there is goodmail and spam all mixed up somewhere, either tagged or
untagged it doesn't matter, the filter hasn't done much of a job.

Somehow the configuration has to result in a very very very small amount
of 'stuff' that has to be humanly examined /somehow/ to determine if it
is spam.  Back in the old days I used to manually move 'obvious' spam to
my eyeballs unopened into the Junk folder.  Certain types of mail needed
to be 'inspected' from the 'interior' -- mail from my friends which had
gone into my BigMail folder and thus was suspicious for possibly being a
virus [or a graphic] and also mail which might be spam and might not.
So I would pick it up by its Properties and look at the message source.
That way I wasn't opening any mails which I didn't already know what was
inside.  I was using the more insecure versions of IE and OE back in
those days, and was quite aware of their insecurities.

And, typically when I handled my mixed goodmail and spam that way I
would move the spam into the Junk folder and it would almost never be
opened.  In those same old days I was manually reporting everything, so
it was also pasted into a notepad type of template and was 'readable' in
that way.  Occasionally something needed to be rendered, but I already
knew the structure and whether I needed to be offline or not.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin