Random musing about words and spam
Eric Murray
ericm at lne.com
Thu Sep 4 21:09:11 PDT 2003
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
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