Why is the title of this phone company email HTML a list of 2,460 random words?

Factual Questions
1

I was searching through archived email and discovered an email from AT&T which has in the title attribute of the HTML formatting a list of about 2,460 totally random words, in English, German, Spanish and French, as well as some partial words, abbreviations, and numbers. What’s the deal with this?

This is the beginning of the list.

printed
Boda
observance
voient
cocker
098
6495
petitions
alters
referenced
skulls
Crumb
preschoolers
vendedores
nicht
racket
catholic
clustered
beber
closest
informational
lise
Vorstand
immature
practices
ferried
Dams
fallout
debuted
070
subsection
essendo
GOULD!
24C
utopia
stamps
byte
dienstags
pelas
referenced
tinge
Reuse
And so on. Can anyone please explain this?

2

Are you positive it’s not spam? Spam uses this technique (spewing lots of words into the message) to defeat filters that reject messages where certain blocked words exceed a certain percentage of the message size. Randomizing the spew for each message helps defeat the “have we seen this message before?” and “is this same message being sent to lots of people?” checks.

3

I highly doubt that is really from AT&T.

4

Might be from Webster or Oxford.

5

Definitely spam.

6

Agreed, it’s not from AT&T. I’ll bet, somewhere in the body of the email, it tells you to click on a link. Hover over it and you’ll see it goes to some website that isn’t AT&T.

7

Yes, I’m positive wasn’t spam. It was part of an email with my telephone and internet account summary. I was changing the account. It definitely is not spam. I’m aware of the nonsensical thing that spammers do, and this is something different.

8

Really? What makes you think it is NOT spam? It has all the earmarks. Why would AT&T send something like this to you?

9

Could be corrupted email. You could have a good email from AT&T that got merged with a shitty spam email and your client is reading them as one.

10

Since you remember the email as legitimate, and I presume did not notice the strange title when it was first received, my guess is the archiving process has a bug and corrupted the title.

Where is the email archived, on the AT&T web-based email system, or on a program on your PC, or what?

11

I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking here.

That’s what I was thinking, but it’s kind of a strange way to get corrupted.

It’s archived in my email client, Thunderbird. I saved moved the email from the Gmail server to a folder in Thunderbird, and then deleted it from the server.

12

You say it’s in the “title attribute” of the HTML. Do you mean that if you use the View Source command, you can see it with <title> before it and </title> after it? (In HTML, that would make it the title element. The term *attribute *is used for parameters to some HTML element, such as src= within an img element.)

HTML emails typically include both the HTML version and a plain-text version of the email. These are stored independently, and may be completely different. (The plain-text version is intended for email clients that lack HTML support.) Does the list of words appear in the plain-text version too?

If AT&T really did send such an email, I wonder if they could have been trying to avoid spam filters, using the same techniques spammers do? That would seem ill-advised, but perhaps effective.