Don’t call me DOM

I have been busy lately deploying a tool that I (and others) had started to develop one year ago, and had been stalled since then, informally called Annospam; the tool allows to cleanse W3C Mailing List Archives from its huge number of spams they host and are likely to continue to receive, however clever our anti-spams systems are getting.

The idea is to use the Annotea protocol as a way to store and retrieve spam marks on archived messages, and to regenerate the relevant archives based on these marks; it uses lots of W3C Technologies (XSLT as a way to build a user interface, RDF/XML as a data format, HTTP as a query/update protocol), which makes it really interesting, if sometimes somewhat challenging.  Read more... (194 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)

Spammers, like many people down here, needs to rest after all their efforts; spammers needs to take a week-end break, too, as shows the repartion of the number of messages per weekday:

(1 is Monday, 7 Sunday) These plots are based on the spam I received in the past 2 months.

Note that in fact, this interpretation is probably buggy; for instance, it’s likely that a fair number of Zombies computers used to send spams are shut down during the week-end.

Although my anti-spam set up works fairly well, I had been surprised in the past months (apparently starting end of May) to get some obvious spams (involving e.g. ‘Valium’ in the subject) going through it without problems. Only today have I realized that this was because the mails were not checked by my SpamAssassin, but (supposingly) by a SpamAssassin on popular free Web-based email services (e.g. yahoo or hotmail); that is, they included the following headers:

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.60-spambr_20030926a on popular_mail_service.com
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-5.9 required=5.0 tests=AWL,NO_REAL_NAME autolearn=no
        version=2.60-spambr_20030926a

Due to the way my SpamAssassin set up works, they were not re-checked when entering my spam filters!  Read more... (229 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)