Scoring Down Usenet Spam in Gnus

For some days over the last few weeks, some of the newsgroups that I was following was overrun with spam.  My article counts for some of the newsgroups was in the high hundreds even as I was catching up with the posts regularly.

Fortunately, Gnus offers  a way to score down the spam and even expunge the articles when the score is lower than a threshold.

Here's one way of doing it.

The SPAM's getting better but it's still getting binned

Every once in a while, I check my Spam folder on on my gmail mail account to see whether there has been any legitimate mail binned, as a result of a false positive match. So far I've rarely had any mail flagged apart from the marketing material sent in by the Mutual funds that I buy.

While scanning the folder, I noticed that the social engineering aspect of spam emails are getting better. If it had not been for the spam filter and my lack of interest in the same spam emails, I think there'd been a bunch of saps who'd got infected with malware or some dreck of some sort.



Take a look at the above screen shot. Topical, covering entertainment, Politics, Tech and Business, it should be enough to pique someone's interest. All he has to do is open the email to get infected with the attached payload or get directed to a website that will install some malware.
Spammers seemed to have moved on from the "inadequate body part/function" mails though there are lots of that too, in my spam folder.

Gmail seems to be doing a fairly good job at identifying and binning them, so that's one strike against the spammers.

But these scum will keep trying, you can bet on that. If only they spent their time on more productive enterprise.