Preventing email spam/Spam identification tactics

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There are a number of techniques that can be used as the basis of identifying potential spam.

This can be based on a combination of the following : * Content type identification, such as the presence of MIME data * regular expression matching for specfic textual paterns in the message headers, or body * data pattern analysis in attachements (like for example program code) * Bayesian network analysis of message headers or text. (building upon simple regexp pattern matching) * Language pattern analysis * Traffic pattern analysis over a large group of messages..

Most of the current generation of 'spam' filtering systems use a combination of one or more of the techniques listed above.