Defeating spam filters

What do these words have in common?

"formic", "brouhaha", "granitic" and "occlusive".

The answer is that they are words that spammers add to their spam messages to "fool" the new Bayesian spam filters that are catching in the neighborhood of 99% of spam once they are trained.

Since spam rarely includes such terms as "granitic," the hope of the spammers is that its presence will out-weight the spaminess of the rest of the message, according to one of the world's experts on spam and spam filters.

Good news first: these words don't work, so the messages will still be filtered.

The bad news: there are words that do work, though you would likely never guess what they are:

"Berkshire", "Marriott", "wireless", "touch" and "comment"

I wasn't totally surprised at the list since I recently received spam with Marriott in the From line.

The process to identify which words work is laborious and they can be protected against once known -- one more bit of good news.