Brendan Hughes

Why the latest fashion for sending spams with fifty supposedly random words in them? Are they a code, or a counter-counter-spam device? I'm getting 5-10 per day.

Last one I got was

array swim margaret allstate render copperfield despond adkins hypochlorous bogy logjam clifton

Just curious.

Alec

Its to confuse spam filters. I think they look for fuzzy matches, like viagra and sex, etc.

That make sense?

what would scooby do

to get past spam detection, now they just send a jpeg image with all the crap in

Brendan Hughes

Hmm. Oddly, the two words I left off the front of that list were viagra something.

I've seen the jpegs, seen the wórds wí th fúnn y sp@ces and ac cénts, they are obvious; but this massive list of random words bugs me.

what would scooby do

Daft question Brendon - is your email address on a website somewhere ?

NotoriousREV

It's to confuse bayesian filters, they're hoping one of the random words matches your filters list of good words and thus allows the mail through.

Brendan Hughes

wwsd - It is, but it's a work email address, so I accept spam (grinds teeth) as a job hazard, it's just the really odd format that gets me puzzled.

On a lighter note, its funny to see that spam is gender specific - I get all the willie extension ones, and my female colleague gets all the boob job ones, but we've pretty much never received vice versa! Guess they have some sort of name sensor.

Thanks Notorious, that sounds about right.

what would scooby do

OK - change your mailto: address link to a java applet and they can't spam you anymore as their scanners don't pick up the address.. I'll dig on out if you need one..

mynickers

http://www.spammingbureau.com/

http://www.spamhaus.org/

Here are a couple of sites that might help...