# Gobbelley-gook in spam. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 17, 2004, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568 "2004-04-17T21:14:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mangeorge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d78d45/32.png) [@mangeorge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mangeorge)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/1 "2004-04-17T21:14:04Z")
What the hell is this; > [@](#): > > screw reason potato rice invention grey/gray powder month cushion wing mass= > nail middle healthy root stretch hospital wheel ant grey/gray weight sugar= > serious before vessel thin hope slope pleasure island thunder go breath we= > ather little well Just a small sample I c&p’d from some spam in my email. It seems to be in most all spam. Does it serve a purpose? I’m sure this has been addressed here before, but I can’t figure out how to search such a thing. Peace, mangeorge ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/2 "2004-04-17T21:16:20Z")
Maybe only dopers got this message, but I also got spam with that subject. I didn’t open it, so I only knew the first two or three words, which were screw reason potato. Still and all, I’ll be looking for an answer. ---
**Author:** ![BraheSilver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@BraheSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BraheSilver)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/3 "2004-04-17T21:35:00Z")
Get out of my head, **mangeorge**! I was just about to ask something like this. While I didn’t get the “screw potato” one, I’ve been hassling my internet provider about the junk I’m getting , which means I have to open some of it to look at the headers. When read in HMTL, they’re picture ads for whatever the spam is (most of the ones I get seem to be about debt consoldation). When read in plain text, there’s a longish paragraph about some random topic. I had one about the pyramids, one about Hamlet, and some excerpt from a story involving two guys fighting over money buried in a coffin. They’re all astonishingly coherent but have nothing to do with the “subject” in the spam. ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/4 "2004-04-17T21:45:50Z")
Yeah, mine was a lot of non-sequiturs - random words, but in the middle was a reference to buying vicodin. It wasn’t clear and there wasn’t any address, but there is was. I believe this is one of those spams that are used by the sender to track who is stupid enough (me) to open it. This sends them a message that says that someone out there doesn’t delete EVERY thing that comes in. Hmmm, a live one, perhaps. Let’s send him some more ads. Or at least, it shows that this e-address belongs to a person, rather than, say, a website. Meaning, again, hmmm, maybe we have a live one here. ---
**Author:** ![Tower\_Dweller](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@Tower\_Dweller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tower_Dweller)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/5 "2004-04-17T21:48:10Z")
It’s used to confuse automated spam filters. As you probably know, a spam attack usually consists of thousands of messages sent out to tons of people. More and more companies are using spam filters to try to stop it before it gets to your inbox. Most spam filters (that I know of) work in two ways: 1. Somebody identifies a particular message as spam. The spam filter is told “this message, that looks like this, is a spam. Delete all of them that you find.” That worked for awhile, until spammers figured it out and wrote programs to change a couple of words here and there in each message sent out - hard for people to do, but really easy for a computer. I remember getting spam with titles like “Get Viagra free!!! iuytadf34” The _iuytadf34_ at the end of the title was to confuse the spam filter - “This is not the spam you are looking for.” 2. New approach - “heuristic” scanning. The spam filter is told “If you see an email with the words Viagra, or penis enlargment, or teen girls, or … it’s probably spam.” Or even better, you tell the spam filter “this is spam, but this isn’t” Over time, the filter builds up a lot of rules about what spam looks like, and what it doesn’t. These usually work really well. But when you get an email that’s full of nonsensical words, and then stuck right in the middle is a little sentence that says “these teenage girls want to …” the filter has no way of telling that it’s a spam - since it doesn’t really know English, it can’t tell the difference between complete giberish and the email from Lumbrick about you missing your header sheet on your TPS report. Caveat - I don’t write spam filtering software or anything - this is just what I understand from reading geeky tech sites. Which I do far too much of, apparently. ---
**Author:** ![Tower\_Dweller](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@Tower\_Dweller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tower_Dweller)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/6 "2004-04-17T21:56:56Z")
> [@CC](#): > > This sends them a message that says that someone out there doesn’t delete EVERY thing that comes in. That’s correct, but only if your email client “renders” HTML. What they do is put a link in the email to an image hosted on their web site. The image is custom-made for each email they send, so it has a unique name. Usually, the image is a 1pixel by 1pixel white space, so you don’t even see it. So when you open your email, and your email program tries to show it to you, it has to go out to the spammer’s web site to get the image. The spammer’s server will log that somebody tried to view the image - since they know that this particular image was sent to **[CC@straightdope.com](mailto:CC@straightdope.com)** (or whatever), they know that you in fact opened the email - a “live one” like you said. Many email programs let you choose how you display your email, and you can elect to see the raw text - no HTML pretty stuff. I’m pretty sure that future email clients will allow you to block the retrieval of images set in HTML-formatted emails. For instance, Yahoo!'s online email blocks all images in your emails by default - they show up as grey blocks. ---
**Author:** ![kellner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c2a13f/32.png) [@kellner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kellner)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/7 "2004-04-17T22:05:26Z")
> [@Tower Dweller](#): > > I’m pretty sure that future email clients will allow you to block the retrieval of images set in HTML-formatted emails. Mozilla Mail and its derivative Thunderbird allow that, at least in more recent versions. ---
**Author:** ![mangeorge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d78d45/32.png) [@mangeorge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mangeorge)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/8 "2004-04-17T22:25:51Z")
Thanks… I see how it works. I suspected maybe it was some kind of searchbait to make the site pop up on google, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Revtim](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/revtim/32/1042_2.png) [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2004, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/9 "2004-04-17T22:51:08Z")
A good and free Outlook plugin: [http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/](http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) This is the type of filter that the spam uses gibberish to try to fool, but the filter very nearly always still catches it and sends it to the spam folder. Good stuff. ---
**Author:** ![ltfire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ea924/32.png) [@ltfire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ltfire)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/10 "2004-04-18T00:02:46Z")
> [@mangeorge](#): > > What the hell is this; > > Just a small sample I c&p’d from some spam in my email. It seems to be in most all spam. Does it serve a purpose? > I’m sure this has been addressed here before, but I can’t figure out how to search such a thing. > Peace, > mangeorge Now, I’m really scaring myself. IT MAKES SENSE TO ME! :eek: ---
**Author:** ![tygerbryght](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a9a28c/32.png) [@tygerbryght](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tygerbryght)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/11 "2004-04-18T05:26:44Z")
> [@mangeorge](#): > > What the hell is this; > > Just a small sample I c&p’d from some spam in my email. It seems to be in most all spam. Does it serve a purpose? > I’m sure this has been addressed here before, but I can’t figure out how to search such a thing. Yeah, I’ve been getting that kind of spam occasionally for the last couple of months. There are a number of different programs available that will scan your incoming email for spam - Norton has a package that includes it. Although I swear by Norton for most stuff, I use a free program - MailWasher - which is available from [http://www.mailwasher.net](http://www.mailwasher.net) (note: it is **NOT** related in any way to Web Washer). I don’t download email until I’ve had MailWasher look at it. It gives me a list of incoming messages from the email accounts I have entered into it. When it retrieves a list of incoming mail, I look at the list for strange addys, subjects, etc. If something looks suspicious, I use MailWasher to look at either the header or the body _without retrieving_ the message. If it’s something I don’t want, I check delete and bounce, then click on “process mail”. It adds that addy to a blacklist, as well as bouncing the message (which makes the sender think mine is a bad addy). ---
**Author:** ![JohnBckWLD](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d6d6ee/32.png) [@JohnBckWLD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnBckWLD)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2004, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobbelley-gook-in-spam/240568/12 "2004-05-03T19:09:42Z")
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