Filter-resistant Spam

SpamSieve
, , ,
1

Dear Michael,

First, let me thank you for your great work and wish you a happy and healthy new year. :grinning:

I’ve been using SpamSieve for quite a few years now. It always watched my inbox like a hawk and filtered spam reliably. Recently, some Spam started to get through, though.

It seems as if SpamSieve has trouble recognizing certain odd name and subject headers. They all look very characteristic but no matter how often I train, they manage to get through. This is what they typically look like:

From: “=?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?4pyJ77iPIEw=?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?SQ==?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?RA==?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?TCDinInvuI8g?=” slginrupnt@thinkprogress.centuryvalue.com

Subject: =?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?w5xi?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?ZXI=?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?cHLDvA==?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?ZmVuIFM=?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?aWUgSQ==?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?aHIgR2Vz?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?Y2hlbg==?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?ayB2?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?b24gTA==?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?aWQ=?==?xuBmWzlzWah9MeGCIUsMCeYaMHLccxHurZlUTF-8?B?bCDwn46BISA=?=

Is it possible that the long content is throwing SpamSieve off?
I’d love to hear back from you, thanks in advance.

All the best,

Toodles

2

Happy New Year to you, too! I would not expect those sorts of headers to cause a problem. Please use the “Save Diagnostic Report” command in the Help menu and send me the report file, as described here and I can take a closer look.

1 Like
3

Thanks, Michael! As AOL would say: “You’ve got mail!” :grinning:

4

Thanks for sending the report. Interestingly, it does not show any trained messages from the sender above. And it does show that some messages took an abnormally long time to train (though no training failures are logged). So something weird is going on with certain messages. Could you save a few of them as files (using File ‣ Save As ‣ Raw Message Source in Mail) and send them to me as attachments?

5

Done! :smiley:

6

Thanks. The two messages that you sent were both processed normally by SpamSieve on my Mac, using the same macOS/Mail/SpamSieve versions that you have. So it’s not clear what’s causing the problem.

To gather some more information about this, please click these two links to enable some SpamSieve debug logging. After relaunching Mail and SpamSieve, try training both of those messages as spam. Then send me a new diagnostic report.