I receive about 10-20 spam emails a day. In the process of deleting them, I read some of them just for fun. I’m wondering, though, why some spam has nonsensical sentences in them. I received a spam today offering graduate degrees with no classes. The bottom of the email read this:
**Any stovepipe can bur pig pen behind, but it takes a real oil filter to of turn signal.toward parking lot, toward ball bearing, and grizzly bear over wedding dress are what made America great!
When you see parking lot around, it means that tenor of ceases to exist.**
The random text is inserted in an attempt to defeat spam-blockers that employ Bayseian analysis. Basically, this is a statistical procedure that attempts to detect “spam-like” text. Adding random text lowers the score of the entire message, thus allowing it to slip under the radar, as it were.
A lot of spam sends a return when opened. This lets the spammers know that you’re looking and that they should send more.
I’ve often wondered about those too. I see them in the subject headers, sometimes as well.
I figured it was a way to get around anti-spam software. The program looks and sees “America, grizzly bear, stovepipe” and etceteras and figures it’s not an ad, but a valid e-mail. I guess it’s random, so that you can’t block it by filtering a certian phrase.
Not if you open it in text-only format. Many times you don’t know if an e-mail message is spam or not until you open it. I do get legitimate mail from strangers too.
I didn’t realize that opening in a text-only format got around this problem. I assume that you’re talking about that little 1 X 1 pixel picture link thingy.
But isn’t there also a way for them to get a return when it’s opened? I used to send e-mails that way at work (using Outlook, it was an option).
The sender can request a return receipt on Internet email, but the recipient has to choose to send one. Unfortunately Outlook is often configured to respond automatically. This behavior is set under Tools|Options|E-mail Options|Tracking Options. It’s best to select Ask me before sending a response or Never send a response.
This can be done on a local mail server that tracks when mail has been pulled from the server. For mail outside your local email server, this feature only works if the recipient runs an email program that actively cooperates by sending back a return receipt. Since most email clients won’t do this (and on most of the ones that can, this behavior can be turned off), it’s a pretty useless feature to anyone except spammers.
Even if you view HTML messages, which I don’t recommend, most modern email clients allow you to set an option not to load images from a remote site. This would stop the 1x1 pixel thing.