Dean Chafee

Gibberish Spam Email - Why Do Spammers Send It?



Posted: Tuesday, May 22, 2007

by
HowToFixYourStuff.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

For more helpful computer related information, visit my computer fix category on HowToFixYourStuff.com.

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Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)
» left by JL
from US 4 years 249 days ago.
And don't respond, even to ask to be deleted from future mailings. That is one way the spammer can determine that he has a "good" email address. Thanks for the tips.
» left by Don
from Metairie, LA 4 years 51 days ago.
It answered my question as to the rationale behind using random words stuffed together in spam e-mail.
» left by Anonymous
 3 years 134 days ago.
But how do you stop it? Do we have to  pay for an answer?
» left by J Stewart
from Raleigh NC 1 year 40 days ago.
You can't stop it ! and don't try to pay someone who says they can, unless you have money to throw away.
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