"fuck" in Wash Post

[Dave Wilton]

> In other words, 6 messages of 15,583, or .03%, are spam with "fuck" in
> the subject. Maybe my mail patterns are really weird, but from my
> data it would seem that filtering on the presence of "fuck" in the
> subject line is a pretty bad way of stopping spam. (And for what
> it's worth, all six of those messages were caught by other means
> by my spam tools.)

While I agree with the comment about not censoring the list (how can we talk
sensibly about those words if we can't use them?), I'm not sure this last is
necessarily valid. The lack of "fuck" in spam subject lines could be a
result of natural selection. Since the very first spam filter probably
killfiled messages with "fuck" in the subject, very few spammers actually
use the term. If anti-spam filters were to stop filtering on this, the
incidence would undoubtedly rise.

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net
  http://www.wilton.net