On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 09:02:30PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
On Tuesday 02 September 2003 19:00, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
Spammers recently adopted tactics of using randomly generated words, eg. "wryqf", in both the subject and the body of the message. ... Could the pseudowords be easily detected by their characteristics, ... Presence of pseudowords then could be added as one of spam characteristics.
Many of them space the code words away from the rest of the subject text, i.e. "Subject: what if it were true? 5258pf2" I think this is to hide the code word since many mail readers only show 40-60 characters of the Subject. I've been id'ing spam by looking for excess whitespace in the Subject line for a couple years (it's one of about 200 checks my program makes). I'm sure other spam-recognition software does this as well. Eric