a short story about a spam assassin. (via Lee Maguire)

I had no idea JD was sick. Very saddened to hear about this, he was a nice guy and a great member of the anti-spam community :(

'a simple parser of ARF compliant FBL complaints, which normalizes the email complaints and generates a 6-tuple n-gram version of the message. These n-grams are stored in a Redis database, keyed by the file in which they can be found. An inverse index also exists that allow you to find all messages containing a particular n-gram word.'

doh (via Graham Cluley)

good wiki tracking spam operations, their current campaigns, who's doing it etc.

DNSWL will charge for subscriptions to "heavy" users and anti-spam vendors

exactly what it says on the tin

'adapted for Windows by JAM Software' -- cool! Thanks Daniel

from last week's CEAS conference; research comparing SpamAssassin releases against the evolution of the surrounding spam environment. Nice work, I always wanted to write up something like this (via JD)

first successful conviction under Irish anti-spam laws -- for a whopping, er, 2,000 Euros. at least it only took 2 complaints from 2 customers each (via Brian Nisbet)

Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale

the Canadian mag "The Beaver" is changing its name due to broken filters' false positives. Bennett Haselton reckons that there's no incentive to fix FPs, which as Henry Stern notes isn't the case

the Rustock botnet is now attempting TLS encryption of spam delivery sessions

DBL announcement. working on the SpamAssassin support for 3.3.1...

John Levine gets DNS*Ls standardized, at last. we should really check SpamAssassin to see if it's compliant, I guess ;)

fascinating note from Bernie Goldbach: 'MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic and the work told me the importance of verifying source material.'

a custom pastebin for spam messages. cool

w00t!

reverse-engineering the output of spam templates. paper isn't published yet, but sounds very interesting, particularly since it overlaps with the SpamAssassin SOUGHT ruleset's methodology, a little, it sounds like. looking forward to reading it

'This is a totally devastating blow to everyone'

'MAAWG [..] says that spam and malicious emails dropped to 89 percent in the second quarter from 90.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.'

Reddit mass-interview of a spammer. apparently he's working on IPv6 support

from Julian "MailScanner" Field (via the SA users list)