I just got four messages from people purporting to sell different services (drug rehab, weight loss, VOIP, home warranty) that, aside from a web address each contained a nonsense paragraph (actually each had two identical copies of the paragraph) of which the following is typical.
What is the purpose of all this. Does it somehow help it escape a spam filter?
Getting past filters, that’s all it is.
I got the best spam this week. Subject line: “Brain Doctors Hate This!”
Fancy term is “Bayesian poisoning”. Basically it increases the false negative rate on your average spam filter, since the particular words and phrases in that pile of nonsense aren’t predictably found in spam. Further, if you train the filter on random words like this, you increase the probability of false positives.
I’m not sure how useful it is these days, since the Gmail filters are completely effective in my experience, but the trick definitely worked back when everyone used weak standalone spam filters.
I’ve seen that for some time. Yes, they do hope to avoid the spam filters but in my experience the spam filters still get them 99% of the time.
So the OP is a 1%er? Cool.
I’ve been getting a variant lately in Outlook (formerly my Hotmail account), with the sender, subject, and message all short bits of gibberish, with a spam link embedded in the message. Sometimes they have no subject line. Of course I delete them immediately.
From: Rrubyk Bm
Subject: Bab esfi lmSh aun daDio r
Message:
vikygic, xy mudolop, qyme [spam link] musyj wofylu ga jigox.
hac wifac.
Outlook seems to get most of these but a few get through to my inbox. I never see them in my Gmail account (although my Outlook/Hotmail is my “spamcatcher” site that I use to sign up for most stuff).
There was a website that collected “spam prose” and some of it is oddly beautiful in a way. So at least spam is responsible for some good in the world. Some of it is entertaining.
And yes this practice is very, very old. I’m surprised you just now noticed it.
Here is one such website (copyright 2004): http://www.lakeffect.net/spamprose/
They’re sending TECO macros as spam now?
We all know that spam depends on a very small number of doofi (among the multitudes) to click on their shit. But it boggles my mind that there are people capable of clicking a mouse button who are yet stupid enough to click on one like that.
Gibberish came the spam till boggled the mind.
Want to know one weird old trick for getting rid of spam? Filters hate me.
Maybe “oddly beautiful” in the same way Vogon poetry is. :rolleyes:
I got a series of random spam messages from Craigslist ads that were obviously excerpts from a book on maple syrup production. I wasn’t selling syrup manufacturing equipment…
Some forms of gibberish spam are probes. They don’t expect humans to click on the links; they’re looking for evidence of each message showing up somewhere on the web. The gibberish is an encoded ID number, allowing them to trace it to its source, and thus figure out which email addresses (or web forms) do something useful.
I am not sure how ISP spam filters work but I suppose they are more sophisticated than what Outlook uses to send mail to the Junk folder. Unlike a mail client, ISPs have the ability to scan large volumes of mail and I think if they see identical messages sent to many people it may deduce that it’s spam (in addition to heuristics used to evaluate whether any given message is spam). I suspect that the gibberish messages are individually randomly generated, preventing it from being detected as a mass mailing. I am a little light on actual facts in this area, however.