Thread: Stop 1 E-mail
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Old December 6th 17, 11:58 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default Stop 1 E-mail

Rene Lamontagne wrote:
Using Thunderbird 52.5 in Windows 10, I have one company that is
consistently sending me E-mail, The company is called Wayfair.ca, they
are an online furniture company, I have created rules from a message
numerous times, I have added them to my hosts file but they still keep
coming through. my hosts file seems OK as I can no longer reach there
web site
They are very annoying as they send them every few days.
Is there any way I can stop them once and for all.

Thanks, Rene


Mail takes an indirect route. It uses servers. The
servers talk to one another.

transport
some_server ------------- some_server
/ \
/ \
wayfair.ca rene.ca

So in that diagram, adding wayfair.ca to your HOSTS
file, won't do anything. Because a packet didn't come
straight from wayfair.ca to your place.

Instead, you need to have a spam filter, somewhere in
that path. The spam filter puts unwanted messages
in a box other than Inbox. It does this, just in
case the message had some value after all, and there
was a "false positive". Occasionally, you visit your
spam bucket, to see if any messages were inadvertently
put there.

*******

I happened to remember one kind of spam filter is
called a Bayesian filter, and used that term to do a search.

https://www.lifewire.com/turn-on-spa...erbird-1173123

A "dumb" spam filter, you manually insert rules. Nobody
wants to do that, but it's "satisfying" to club a regular
offender that way.

A "smart" filter, you click the message you don't want and
tell the filter "I don't like this one", and after a while,
it learns all the characteristics of the unwanted messages.
So rather than attempt to manually construct a rule, you
"teach" the filter which ones are bad, and it does all
the math for you.

Bayesian filters are far from perfect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_...spam_filtering

"Depending on the implementation, Bayesian spam filtering
may be susceptible to Bayesian poisoning, a technique
used by spammers in an attempt to degrade the
effectiveness of spam filters that rely on Bayesian
filtering.

A spammer practicing Bayesian poisoning will send out
emails with large amounts of legitimate text (gathered
from legitimate news or literary sources). Spammer tactics
include insertion of random innocuous words that are not
normally associated with spam, thereby decreasing the
email's spam score, making it more likely to slip past
a Bayesian spam filter."

So a word salad is one way to battle back against Bayesian.
And I did receive some "stock trading spam" at work, where
the "message" to be delivered, was made from a series of
GIFs. So there were no words in the message to trigger
a filter. It's pretty hard to Bayesian a message with
nothing in it.

If the company in question is legit, they won't resort to
word salad, and after a few clicks, you'll have seen the
last wayward furniture advert. They'll go into your spam
bucket, and there will be a nice orderly list of identical
looking spams from your furniture place in that list.

Paul
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