Why do some spam titles end in jibberish? (contains typical spam titles)

Factual Questions
1

I have a hotmail address I use as spam bait for whenever I have to provide an email address to register for a site, eg Amazon or ebay. I have the preferences set so that all email goes to a junk folder, which I empty every couple weeks. I’ve noticed that a lot of the spam that ends up there has the usual spam titles, followed by a meaningless sequence of letters. For example, today I deleted the following:

Bl*w Job Girls, lnrm 
Cum Sucking Hoes, kaxrslsi
Mortgage Rates Are Down. ihsgsfik 
Cum Dribblers, wfkjlnxd 
August 1, 2002 FREE XXX Pic of the Day, hgoks

Does anyone here know what the significance of these letters is? Thanks in advance.

2

Here’s why:

Some Spamtraps use the subject to trap spam.

They have Spamtrap Emails out there, that NEVER get real mail.

So, Spamtrap gets an Email:

Hot Lesbo Porn!

As the subject.

So, all the member emails, that have Hot Lesbo Porn! as the subject, get deleted.

So, we’ll add some jibberish to the end. Everyone and every post to a newsgroup gets different jibberish. That defeats the spamtrap.

3

Thanks PhilAlex.

4

PhilAlex, can’t the Spamtrap that you mention just do the same thing, but instead of “subject equals” use “subject contains” therefore defeating the purpose of the gibberish at the end ?

5

So, you’re admitting your guilt. Nice. :putz:

6

Definitely. Has anyone aqtually written that? I dunno.

7

They could, but spammers sometimes use vaguely appropriate subject lines. With a ‘contains’ filter instead of an ‘equals’ filter, you can end up deleting real messages with a similar subject line to the spam, so they’re harder to write.

8

As a matter of fact, all it would take is one spam message without a subject to kill all messages, if you used a “contains” filter. Every string contains the empty string.

Besides, what if the sample message the spamtrap picks up is “Hot lesbo sex! ahgr”? None of the other spam messages will contain that.

9

Presumably, there would be human intervention at some point.

10

ultrafilter: But having to weed through messages by hand anyway defeats the purpose, no?

11

Usenet spam uses numbers for this. Thus if you see a message in a newsgroup titled something like “Don’t miss this! 3618” you know to give it a pass.

12

No, because you could tell it that the real title was “hot lesbo sex”, and it could adjust its settings accordingly.

13

A real problem for some people… Not me of course… Is that they can’t use Spamtraps that exclude anything with HOT LESBO SEX, because they are actually looking for HOT LESBO SEX.

Again, not me. Not me at all.