Jan 25

Written by: profitimo
Friday, January 25, 2008

We have all seen many spam emails that just make no sense. They contain pure gibberish in the subject and body of the message, many times with no link, no sales pitch and just seem totally useless. So why do the Spammers send this junk?

There is much more to it than you may think. On the surface it just looks like they are trying to tick you off but under the hood it is much more cynical.

Reason 1
The main reason is the Spammers are pushing out millions of gibberish messages is to confuse the anti spam blocking filters. Spam filters that use statistical analysis or Bayesian antispam filter are prone to being fooled by these as "good" messages and therefore change their threshold for allowing such messages to pass. This threshold or scoring method is what many spam filters like SpamAssassin use to determine if a message is spam or not. This is also known as stuffing the statistics and are simply self serving to the Spammers.

Reason 2

Another method you will see used is very similar but the message actually includes the sales pitch to sell pharmaceuticals, push the stock or even contain a virus or worm. Many times the subject contains nonsense words or a recent news tag line and inside the message there will be a block of text that is entirely unrelated to the sales pitch. This text block appended to the message is sometimes a block of text from a blog or website and sometimes is just random words stuffed together. Again, these methods are designed to confuse the spam filters.

Reason 3

Spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their attacks. You have probably hear these things 100 times, but they are worth repeating... to protect your inbox and your computer, make sure you are running a good anti spam system on your mail server and/or your personal computer. Also, do not open a message that looks like junk, do not use the preview pane in Outlook or other email clients, and do not open attachments or clicks links in you email unless you are sure of their origin.

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Related Links:

How do I stop getting spam? - BBC 

Do Spammers Send Emails from YouTube Servers - by Kristen Nicole

How do spammers harvest email addresses ? - By Uri Raz (Must Read)

How to Stop Spam e-mails from Getting to Your Inbox? - By Lili James

How To Identify Spam Just By Reading Them Once? - By Karl Sultan

Online Videos:

How to really stop spammers?

Anti Spam (no not the food)  

Author: Dean Chafee

Email: dchafee (at) dc-sys (dot) com

Over 25 years experience in the computer field. Over 10 years in IT management. I enjoy problem solving and helping others solve their problems. Currently manage an IT team supporting over 60 servers and 45 desktops. I am very hands-on with every aspect of supporting the computing environment. I am primarily self taught with a couple years of Computer Science at the local college. My professional history has taken me from IBM mainframes, to the first IBM x86 PC to today's high end servers and networks.

Owner and creator of HowToFixYourStuff.com and AllAboutYourNetwork.com

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