Random word emails
What’s with all these spam emails I keep getting that are full of random words? How does it profit anyone to send me that? The best thing I can think of is that it’s designed to poison anti-spam measures so I get annoyed and turn them off, but that seems like a bit of a weak justification…
They’re designed to get past a specific type of spam filter that work by statistical analysis of words that spammers typically use.
By throwing in some non-spam words they hope to fool the filter into thinking it’s not spam.
It doesn’t work with the latest round of filters though.
See http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
23 minutes later
It’s not that, these are just random words, no sales attached.
In all the ones I’ve had, the reason I don’t see anything beyond the random words is that I’m ignoring the HTML portion of the post, if you look at the raw code of the page (Assuming Thunderbird, that’s view source. I’ve no idea what you use though) and all the sales stuff is in the HTML
31 minutes later
Oh, they’re HTML, are they? Mutt hides all that from me :) I thought they were just random words and no other content at all. Must check that.
50 minutes later
Hehe I was thinking the same thing about these spam emails I’m getting which seem to be nothing but random words and passages… but then I turned on image loading, and it turns out the spam was trying to sell something after-all (and getting past my filters successfully, I’m sad to say)
36 hours later
If your mail reader lets you, switch the view to ‘raw message’ and you’ll see all the garbage that got scraped off before you saw the random words. You’ll also see a lot more words.
Nice to know that the SPAM filters are working.
4 weeks later
I get these too. But I see no advertising of any nature, In the message or the HTML.
Here is the HTML for one message I got today. Just random words except that they all start with the letter a,b,c or d.
Any ideas ??
collimate alexandre, chili database bank, allowance confusion. dilution castle biracial audiovisual
conceit criterion being. denotative cerulean deer bled averred died bartholomew denmark
d’oeuvre aberrant accost chao. benthic acuity binocular bluebush approval birch camera
180 weeks later
I think the objective of the spammer is obtaining working e-mail addresses from random ones. Imagine, if 1 000 000 mails are sent and 1% of them generate automatic replys (out-of-office, for example), he will have 10 000 working e-mail addresses to use in the future in commercial spam. The message itself means nothing, it’s just a bunch of random words taken from a diccionary (a,b,c,d, like you said, remember?).
184 weeks later