gonadman

Some of the spam I receive has ridiculous senseless titles that do not mean anything. Furthermore, after the sales pitch, sometimes there is a paragraph at the bottom of the email consisting of what seems like random words without any coherence whatsoever. Why do they do this?

I can understand paragraphs of random words on a website to generate hits on a search engine, and I can even understand a nonsense email title to generate curiosity so the email is read before deletion. But why the nonsense paragraph in the body of the email?

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MSD

To throw off spam filters

MageB420666

Plus it's just the spammers trying to be just that much more annoying.

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gonadman

Impossible to be any more frickin annoying than they already are...

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-Carlos Castaneda

shakran

what i like are the ones that come from a fake email address and include no contact info in the body. Even if you WERE stupid enough to buy whatever pile of crap they're selling, how could you tell them you wanted it?

MageB420666

Ummm..... Gonad,


Bad news, they already have, guess what pop-ups are?
just another form of unwanted advertising.... aka spam

And it's getting more and more prominent...and annoying.

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gonadman

At least I can install a pop up blocker to get rid of most of the pop ups. But does a company really believe that sending me four emails a day, every day about the same damn online pharmacy is going to convince me to use that pharmacy? I wouldn't use it if it was the last pharmacy on Earth, and I know most others feel the same way.

MrSD, can you explain to me how those extra words defeat the filters? I had assumed the filters look for user defined words or phrases, or specified spam address origins to filter out the unwanted emails.

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For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, ...breathlessly.
-Carlos Castaneda

Stompy

Not to get off topic, but I think it's funny how there's this big uproar about spam on the internet when there's no uproar of actual physical junk mail in your postal mailbox.

I get about 2-3 real pieces of mail per week and the rest is just junk ads and other bullshit that I need to f'n sift through. IMO, that shit is infinitely more irritating than spam.

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the_marq

I tend to agree with what Stompy was saying, real physical junk mail is far worse than spam. At least on the surface.

The trouble is below the surface; If Company X wants to send real mail to me to advertise their shit that I don't want they have to, pay for paper, pay for printing, pay for postage and create a trail back to themselves (IE: toll free number, return address etc...).

If Company X wants to send a million spam messages to the entire state of Florida for example, it costs almost nothing to do so. Furthermore, they can advertise anonymously. Most spammers get paid for every click they generate, the spammer himself is not really selling anything.

Lastly, if the current rate of spamming continutes unabated, we could see an end to email by the end of 2008, the network (IE: the Internet) just cannot handle the load.

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#3 in a series

God of Thunder

One of the reasons spammers go to such extremes is to harvest good e-mails. They send you something so ridiculous, they hope most people will hit the unsubscribe link.

DO NOT DO THIS!!!!!!!!!!!

You have now provided them with a legitimate e-mail address they can sell to someone else. The trick is they are not trying to sell the product in their pitch. They are fishing for e-mails.

Say they send out 1 million e-mails. Even if 1% respond, thats 10,000 known good e-mails. Not bad for a few minutes worth of work.

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Sargeman

Not to start a new thread so I'll just add it on to this one since they're somewhat related.

Why are some emails blank? I mean no title and no content. Just a blank email.

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MageB420666

well, I don't know much about spam, but it could contain hidden HTML code that when you open it, causes your browser to send a notice to the sender that you opened the mail, giving them a "good" adress. But I don't know much about this so my idea is probably complete bullshit.

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roachboy

apparently there are folk out there who are collecting spam messages and treating them as a form of poetry.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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Dane Bramage

Slightly off topic, but the thing that I find totally ironic/annoying is when I get spam from companies selling anti-spam filters! I mean... WTF is that all about? Have they no morals?

DB.

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MageB420666

No they don't have morals, if they did they obviously wouldn't be spamming people. It's actually a very ingenious business method, although a very unethical one.

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whocarz

The best title of a spam email I recieved has to be "Two fisted pole climb". I laughed my ass off.

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Slavakion

A lot of spam filters look at the text for "valid" words. These words usually don't include viagra, nasty twins, unsecured mastercard, etc. But if spammers include enough "good" words, they'll slip through. It's kinda the same as when you google something, and one of the results looks like what you want until you click on it. Then you go to a page that has like 200 phrases in one big paragraph. Google's algorithms read this and say "Oh, look how well it matches the search term." There ya go.

RespectThat

i like spam, goes good with hot-pockets

water_boy1999

SPAM is a total time whore. If you add up the total amount of time people spend in a given day to delete spam, think of the hours of wasted work time. My beef with spam is I am a "hunt and pecker", meaning I don't look at the monitor usually when I type. I'l be going off on a particular subject and not know that a pop-up has appeared. Because it is now the top partition on my desktop, whatever I just typed never makes it to the page of destination. Also, it turns into a big mess if you accidentally hit any part of the spam page. It will open up numerous others instantly and cause even more headache.

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Lebell

I think I hate the asshats that actually buy from spammers even more than spammers themselves...if not for them, spammers couldn't make a living stuffing my inbox with spam.

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gonadman

How about the spam that's obviously from foreign mailboxes? The ones that have all the words misspelled and don't make any grammatical sense? I can't believe anyone would buy anything from them.

Anyway, getting back to topic, I still don't understand how all that excess jibberish in the body of the message helps to defeat spam filters, if that's it's purpose. Can anyone help?

__________________
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, ...breathlessly.
-Carlos Castaneda

welshbyte

This essay sums up all the most popular spam filtering techniques and shows the tricks that spammers use to bypass each one. The fact that spam always looks like total nonsense is really the best way for spammers to trick filters into thinking that the email is a genuine one. After reading that essay you kind of understand what each bit of jibberish is like:

"Hmm, this email has the words 'kitchen basket' in the subject line, i wonder why"
"Ohhh yeah, thats probably because bayesian filters might give those words a low spam rating"

Spammers actually test their spam against different filters before they send them out to make sure its going to hit the maximum amount of inboxes. Spammers aren't stupid, but they're obviously not too concerned about being one of the most despised groups of people in the world right now.

BTW, the site that the essay is on is a pretty good read, Paul Graham is a good writer and knows a lot about spam and a lot of other stuff. I read a bit of it every now and then.

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gonadman

Welshbyte-

Thanks for the link. My idea of a spam filter was a program that deleted every Email with the word *VIAGRA* in it!

__________________
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, ...breathlessly.
-Carlos Castaneda