I get a lot of junk e-mail. Most of them have subject-lines having nothing to do with the contents, apparently to trick me into thinking it is not an ad. But what they all have in common is a trailing superfluous character. So for example, these e-mails will have subjects like
That was a Blast f
When do you need this v
Thanks for help o
Why that extra character?
One theory of mine is that they are all generated by the same spam company and they have a bug in their e-mail-generating program that is showing up in all e-mails but they haven’t noticed it yet.
I believe they are trying to avoid simplistic profiling filters. If they use the same subject line, it is easier to identify and filter them, but if they append some random characters both in the subject and the body, it makes profiling more difficult. That extra character at the end of the subject is the spam equivalent of a fake mustache on a guy trying to sneak past a security guard.
I’ve been getting these lately where random characters are appended to each word in the title: vwget ak muchjd tslarger peniswq. Stupid - my spam filter still catches them
Unfortunately I still have to babysit my spam filter at the moment as it needs to learn the difference between porn spam and legitimate emails from The Erotic Print Society (one of our clients).
If the random characters try to alter the appearance of individual words, then it’s trying to avoid individual spam filters. For instance, if the spammer spells “porn” as “p o r n” or “p.o.r.n” it’s trying to avoid an individual content scanner. On the other hand, when the spammer adds random junk to either the subject line or the body, they’re trying to avoid online systems that profile spam and share information. In these cases, you have a central smart filter that maintains a database of spam it has received and you have remote client systems which don’t have their own filter but just compare incoming mail to known-spam from the central database. In these cases, you count on the central system receiving and cataloging the spam before it hits (or gets processed by) the client systems, and making minor changes during the run of a batch of spam can trick the system.
Doesn’t your spam filter include a whitelist, a list of “always accept” addresses/domains?
I also wonder how successful the trick spamming is. I mean, how often does someone see an email with the subject Refinance Your Mortgage, think, “Gosh! That’s just what I need - I’ll check it out”, only to open it, find porn, and then say, “Wow! I wanted porn even more!”
I think it’s the same strategy that leads retail stores to put racks of candy next to the checkout line. I almost never go in a store to get candy, but I might grab one up while I stand in line because it’s there and appeals to a craving. Similarly, most people never go looking for porn and they might never open an email that purports to be porn, but if a link pops up with some prurient content, they’re already one step closer and they might click.
I don’t think it’s that simple. They’re not selling mortgages or porn (well, maybe the latter, but in hope rather than expectation). They’re harvesting outrage: less experienced users reply in a huff, confirming valid email addresses that can then be sold on in a vicious circle to other spammers.
This presumes that the spam industry is a pyramid scheme, making money only by selling spam services/lists to other spammers. I don’t think that’s true. There have been a number of stories in the media lately which profiled spammers and discussed how they make their money. At least in these cases, the spammers were sending ads for legitimate products/services (as much as any scumbag who uses spam could be considered legit). The ultimate goal of the spam was to sell the product or drive traffic to the website, not simply confirm active email addresses. What you describe does happen and a lot of spammers are actively involved in building and verifying their lists, but unfortunately businesses outside the spam industry do pay for their services and receive some benefit. If not, the industry would have withered by now.
I used to work for A very large OnLine service provider in the Network Operation Center(NOC). A system was put in place to track spam. I never learned exactly how the system worked, it was a big secret even to NOC employees.
What I did learn is that the mail system looked for large amounts of mail coming from one domain that had the same subject line. Once the system was triggered a NOC employee would check out the mail, and if it was spam, mass delete it before it got to the in boxes of the users. (Note, spam cost the company a huge amount of money)
Then the spammers figured out what was happening and changed tactics. They started adding extra characters and some other things to get the spam through.
Trying to get rid of spam is going to be an ongoing fight for a long time.
Absolutely. It seems (based on nothing more substantial than my current webmail account inboxes) that the majority of these adverts are spurious at best, though, which makes it harder for me to tell the genuine from the pyramid.
It does, but many of the email enquiries we get are from new (prospective) customers, regarding supply of some book called Phallic Images or Sex on paper (or some such) - I’m using SpamPal, which has a plugin for Bayesian filtering, so it should be able to work quite reliably once it has been trained.