I have a Hotmail account, and I have been noticing over the course of a year or so, a lot of emails coming into my Hotmail inbox have some funky font characteristics in the subject line. Normally, these go to the Junk Email folder, but sometimes one or two slip through. The characteristics though, are often the same.
How are people able to format subject lines with bold text, italicized text, bold and italicized text, or some funky font in there? In some cases, they’re even adding emojis. I just checked a GMail account I have, and I see similar things.
What gives? How are people doing this in subject lines?
Tripler
This font-funkiness is my first clue that it’s spam.
Email subject lines support Unicode encoding nowadays. This is what allows subject lines to contains flame symbols or other emoji.
Unicode also includes some characters that look like Western script but don’t have the same code points (character numbers), such as Greek letters or Enclosed Alphanumerics.
The spam filters at GMail, Hotmail, etc. may not be able to catch some keywords if they’re spelled using these characters (for instance: this “VΙAGRA” is spelled with an uppercase Greek iota instead of a i) , so modern spammers will often use those characters.
In the same vein, if I write VIAGRA using basic Western letters but with the A in italics, the html tags can break up the word so the spam filter may not catch it.
Thank you! I had no idea about Unicode!! I assume that’s the same symbol set that lets the kids nowadays do that shoulder-shrug-smiley face thing. . .
Tripler
I am now learned on newfangled stuff.
Unicode does include codes for emojis. There is an official committee that gets to decide which emojis are immortalized as Unicode characters. You can submit your own proposal.
The Unicode standard does not say exactly what the image needs to look like; that’s why a give emoji will look different on an iPhone vs. a Samsung Android phone.