Does Spam Blockers underlying public rules make it less effective?
No. Actually, the openness makes it more effective whereas security through obscurity is not a effective way to gain security. Spam Blocker’s underlying rules are public. Although it is true that public rules provide smart spammers information to help determine how to evade the rules, smart spammers can, and do, use trial-and-error techniques to figure out the rules — without any public information. Even when smart spammers know the rules, they can’t always evade them. Many spammers don’t read the public rules, and don’t understand them as evidenced by old rules that still catch a lot of spam. By making the rules public, the large community of “good guys” improves the existing rules and produces new, clever rules that spammers can’t evade. Spam Blocker is constantly updating its rules, so don’t disable automatic updates. Note: If you’re a savvy user, and want to add rules to Spam Blocker’s underlying rules, you can contribute rules.
