It is with heart full of hope that I write to seek your help in the
context below.
I am Musa Bamaiyi the first son of the former Nigerian Chief Of General
Staff under the Late Head Of State General Sani Abacha whose Sudden
death occurred on 8th of June 1998.
Having gotten your particulars from the internet. I have no doubt about
your capacity and good will to assist me in receiving this consignment
into your foreign Account, the sum of US$32Million willed and deposited
in my favor in a security company by my father who is currently in
prison under the charges of embezzlement which is a lie perpetrated by the
present government of the day to frustrate all former officials in
government before them.
This money is currently kept in a trust security company in Europe
under a fictitious name as the present government has on assumption in
office setup a panel of inquiry to the financial activities of my father
with a decision to freeze all his assets respectively which they have
succeeded so far except for this sum in question .
The Government had earlier placed Foreign Travelling Embargo on all our
family members and sized all known local and International outfits of
our business empire.
The situation has been so terrible that we are virtually living on the
assistance of well wishers. In view of this plight therefore, I expect
you to be Trust Worthy and Kind enough to respond to this call soon to
save family and I from a hopeless future.
I hereby agree to compensate your sincere and candid effort in this
regard with 20% while 10% goes to offset all expenditure including
transport and all used to ensure the proper claim of this funds when finally
received in your Local Bank Account.
Please endeavor to keep this under strict confidentiality so that
nobody knows about this funds as it is our only hope.
Blessings Be yours.
Best wishes,
Musa Bamaiyi.
Note: Please send reply to thise-mail mr_musa@earthling.net or call me
on my telephone number 234-803-3010904.
It seems that 90% of the spam at ruby-talk is from Nigerian Generals or
bankers trying to share their fortune with us.
Could we setup a spam filter that automatically deletes emails whose
bodies contain the word “Nigeria”, and the $ character in the near
vicinity of the word “million”?
To help make sure that we don’t eliminate legitimate email we can also
look for the words “assist”, “money”, “trust” and “government”.
It seems that all incantations of this email contain all of these words,
and it seems unlikely that a legitimate email would meet all these
conditions.
Cheers,
···
–
Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137
I would rather delete the occasional spam manually than have to wade through
discussions of how rule-based filtering should be configured on the mailing
list every time a different piece of spam gets through.
You can always implementing rule-based filtering at the client side if you
wish.
Regards,
Brian.
···
On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 02:57:14PM +0900, Daniel Carrera wrote:
It seems that 90% of the spam at ruby-talk is from Nigerian Generals or
bankers trying to share their fortune with us.
Could we setup a spam filter that automatically deletes emails whose
bodies contain the word “Nigeria”, and the $ character in the near
vicinity of the word “million”?
As an aside not only would the origonal spam be removed by your rules,
but your comment on the spam and Brians’ comment on your comment. For
for one spam we would have two false positives.
As an aside not only would the origonal spam be removed by your rules,
but your comment on the spam and Brians’ comment on your comment. For
for one spam we would have two false positives.
But those 2 “false positives” were a direct result of the spam. Without
the spam, they would not have been posted. That’s 3 unnecessary messages
for 1 spam.
This is why killing spam is so hard.
True, and this is why killing spam is so important.
Did no-one ever tell you that nothing worthwhile is ever easy?
(other than learning ruby, of course)
As an aside not only would the origonal spam be removed by your rules,
but your comment on the spam and Brians’ comment on your comment. For
for one spam we would have two false positives.
This is why killing spam is so hard.
If you use the latest version of Mozilla the mail client includes a
Bayesian spam filter. I’ve only been using it for about a week, but
already it catches over 95% of the spam I receive, and there was only
one false positive on the day I first started using it. For instance,
the filter marked the first message in this thread as junk, but was
smart enough to realize that the replies were not junk.
Of course, this only helps if you subscribe to ruby-talk rather than
read the newsgroup.
–
Jason Voegele
“There is an essential core at the center of each man and woman that
remains unaltered no matter how life’s externals may be transformed
or recombined. But it’s smaller than we think.”
– Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Long Sun
And a Bayesian spam filter requires a body of marked ‘non-spam’ as well as
‘spam’, so it only works at the client side; another good reason to do the
filtering yourself, not on the list.
(That is, unless someone is going to volunteer to mark each ruby-talk
message as ‘spam’ or ‘non-spam’ - a sort of post-mortem moderator. But their
efforts would give such a minimal benefit to the community that I don’t
think it’s worth it. The amount of spam I receive from sources other than
ruby-talk is at least 100 times higher)
I would not like to see any static rules-based filters on ruby-talk: they
have too many false positives, and every time a false negative occurs it
will start a thread saying “why don’t we update the filter set to match XXXX
…” which IMO is worse than the spam itself
Anyone who hates spam can apply their own filters, and they will have the
benefit of trapping spam from other sources as well.
Actually, since I thought ruby-talk is gatewayed to/from Usenet, it seems
strange that we get so little spam here?
Regards,
Brian.
···
On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 09:01:13PM +0900, Jason Voegele wrote:
As an aside not only would the origonal spam be removed by your rules,
but your comment on the spam and Brians’ comment on your comment. For
for one spam we would have two false positives.
This is why killing spam is so hard.
If you use the latest version of Mozilla the mail client includes a
Bayesian spam filter. I’ve only been using it for about a week, but
already it catches over 95% of the spam I receive, and there was only
one false positive on the day I first started using it. For instance,
the filter marked the first message in this thread as junk, but was
smart enough to realize that the replies were not junk.
If you use the latest version of Mozilla the mail client includes a
Bayesian spam filter. I’ve only been using it for about a week,
but
already it catches over 95% of the spam I receive, and there was
only
one false positive on the day I first started using it. For
instance,
the filter marked the first message in this thread as junk, but was
smart enough to realize that the replies were not junk.
Of course, this only helps if you subscribe to ruby-talk rather
than
read the newsgroup.
There’s a very good bayesian POP proxy on sourceforge; POPfile. If
you’re using POP for mail, it’s excellent. I’m getting 98%+ accuracy
with it after a couple months. The beauty of it also is that it
doesn’t just do “spam” and “not-spam” (though you can set it up that
way if you want). You can have as many buckets as you choose; I
think I have about 6, 1 of which is my spam catchall.
···
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Did no-one ever tell you that nothing worthwhile is ever easy?
(other than learning ruby, of course)
Licking your own elbow is not easy but it can hardly be called worthwhile.
My cat disagrees.
To take another quote out of context:
“If it hurts then you are probably doing it wrong”
My cat agrees.
Hal
···
----- Original Message -----
From: “Peter Hickman” peter@semantico.com
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 5:03 AM
Subject: Re: PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Actually, since I thought ruby-talk is gatewayed to/from Usenet, it seems
strange that we get so little spam here?
Well actually, ruby-talk gets the most spam I’ve seen in a list
(although I have to admit this is the first list I take the time to go
thorugh ALL the postings).
I kinda like the easy going nature of it here.
To continue with the OT, we might tell the guys at TheReg to do a piece
about the frequency of 419 scam spams. Maybe get a T-shirt for a 419
scam in japanese :))
V.-
My company is doing anti-spam business. Our product is based on Bayesian
technology. The Nigerian spam is quite hard to filter, however after
about 3-4 times training, our filter can pick it out correctly. If
anyone is interested to try our product pls visit http://www.spamweed.com
Since I am also a subscriber here, I would be happy to give you free
regcode if you like our product. Thank you very much. (please don’t
treate this mail as an advertisement and filter it out
I would not like to see any static rules-based filters on ruby-talk: they
have too many false positives, and every time a false negative occurs it
will start a thread saying “why don’t we update the filter set to match XXXX
…” which IMO is worse than the spam itself
My company is doing anti-spam business. Our product is based on
Bayesian technology. The Nigerian spam is quite hard to filter,
however after about 3-4 times training, our filter can pick it out
correctly. If anyone is interested to try our product pls visit http://www.spamweed.com Since I am also a subscriber here, I would
be happy to give you free regcode if you like our product. Thank
you very much. (please don’t treate this mail as an advertisement
and filter it out
apropos e-mail filtering…
I am writing a GPL’d Ruby program that allows to kick unwanted
messages from a POP server without downloading the entire message
(it only uses the header).
Presently the filtering is very simple but the program is written in
such a way that the filtering itself is completely left to a filter-
configuration file (that is a Ruby script as well) so it can easily
be replaced.
I am trying to be done with documentation by the end of this weekend.
The program does not and is not meant to replace a SPAM filter that
does identify SPAM based on quite elaborate rules. It is mainly to
remove the obvious annoyances BEFORE the messages are transfered to
my machine. I am thinking about making it a SPAM filtering fetchmail
replacement written in Ruby but that is a long-term goal. The short
term goal will be using a better SPAM filter and that means learning
about techniques used by other software.
I use a 56 K modem and presently are under fire by ‘Microsoft
Security Updates’ that at the moment are approximately 99.0 of the
data that hit my POP account. Fortunately the beginning of that
bombardment did happen to be the first usable version of my program.
According to me the program already does a good job even though much
is still to be done.
Licking your own elbow is not easy but it can hardly be called
worthwhile.
My cat disagrees.
I hate to have to ask this but; Are you sure your cat knows its arse
from its elbow (or maybe this is an English thing).
I’ve been chastised offlist for the
frivolous waste of bandwidth, so
let’s kill this subthread.
Hal
···
----- Original Message -----
From: “Peter Hickman” peter@semantico.com
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
