Stock/Investor spam on the rise

Gmail's normally great filter is letting itself down

[mm1220]

Perhaps a cause of this recent wave of spam is that the message originals show the text of these emails as

V0UgQ0FMTEVEIElUIEFUIC4zOCBDRU5UUyBOT1cgSVRTIEFUICQyLjQwISAN
CldJVEggQUxPVCBNT1JFIFJPT00gVE8gTU9WRSENCg0KQSBIVUdFIFBSIENB
TVBBSUdOIElTIFVOREVSV0FZIEZPUiBGUklEQVlTIFRSQURJTkchISENCkVY
UEVDVCBTT01FIFZFUlkgTklDRSBHQUlOUyBUT01NT1JPVyBNT1JOSU5HIElO
VE8gTU9OREFZISENCg0KKiogQUNUIFFVSUNLIEFORCBUUkFERSBPVVQgVEhF

whereas we get to see the sales pitch!

Surely gmail's filter could parse the above and recognise it as spam?

[Tropical Island]

I'm being flooded with "go back to school" phony diploma mills lately. Many make it into the in-box even though I faithfully mark each one as SPAM.

It's time to bring another one of these SPAM kings down.

The last time they did the SPAM was down to a trickle. It's still no where near the level it was a few years ago.

[mm1220]

Is the message text all garbled up when you click "Show Original" on the spam mails that make it through to your inbox?

[Tropical Island]

Don't know. Will have a look at the next one.

[Tropical Island]

I've been reviewing the SPAM stuff as it arrives in our in box.

It has been falling into two categories.

One has an attachment that downloads an HTML page to view.

The other is just a standard SPAM e-mail mostly from stock promoters.

They are easy to pick out visually however for some reason the Google filters do not catch them. It's a significant percentage of total SPAM that they miss.

[mm1220]

I wonder whether they're taking into account the "Report Spam" data on a continuous basis? Given the performance of the spam filter on the specific kind of spam we've been seeing (and tagging) over the last while I'd say they improve the filters in big updates. Not so good :/