212671 - Do something about filtering junk mail based on random sequences of non-word characters

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(MailNews Core :: Filters, enhancement)

Description

[Ray Trent]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030618
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030618

It is becoming more and more common for spam to consist of little besides an
HTML block that points to a randomly generated gobbledygook URL for it's
content, or that contains random strings designed to fool filters. 

It would be really nice to have an option to augment the pseudo-bayesian filter
currently in Mozilla with some kind of filter that rejects emails containing
words with too many nonsensical letter combinations. 

Since this would be different for each language and possibly each user, this
should probably be an extension of the existing pseudo-bayesian filter that
operates in parallel on pairs of letters. Another good reason for making it a
separate but similar process is that this kind of operation should probably be
optimized very differently from the existing one.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Patrick]

Possibly a wontfix kinda bug. Too many difficulties to make this work, due to
language problems etc. as you point out yourself.

All you can hope for is that the spam messages contain enough other tokens to
qualify them as spam. Mine seems to filter VERY well, even the random sequence
messages.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
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Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.