SPAM dummies?

[MilDoc]

Every day I get a lot of spam with subject lines like these (and more) that arrived today:

"committeeman but baccarat in littoral"
"arouse and styrofoam ! cub"
"cohere be peaceful may nostalgic"

and others. I get why the subject lines are nonsense - to get around most spam filters. But can they really expect anyone to open / respond to this junk? All I do is delete. OTOH, maybe there are more idiots with email than I suspect, and they actually do open/read!

If I paid a spammer to send stuff for me and found lines like this, first I'd get my money back, then I'd shoot him where it hurts!

[gsmittle]

Unfortunately, somebody somewhere is falling for this junk, or there'd be a lot less of it.

I opened one accidentally the other day, and I noticed that the ad inside was a picture, not text, presumably to get around spam filters.

I'm about ready to go back to carrier pigeons....

g.

[ironhat]

<snip>

If I paid a spammer to send stuff for me and found lines like this, first I'd get my money back, then I'd shoot him where it hurts!

Too funny... I'm trying to decide where I'd shoot him if I **didn't** want it to hurt - LOL!! (Yea, I know where you mean - youch!)

[25]

The worst part about those images is that if it opens it's to late and they have already know that you saw the image. If you don't have your email set to show plain text only, they can imbed tracking code.

The bad part is though that if all they were getting is a bunch open and zero sales they would have stopped, but they must be getting some kind of sales out of it.

[TheRic]

Yea, pictures is one of the new ways around the filters. The miss spelling are another, many times they are randomly changed / misspelled, makes it harder for a spam filter to zero in on spam and real messages. The RE: in the subject line is another, so is a blank subject line.

Many of them also have text embedded in the email. Sometimes you can't see it, they make it invisible, or white. They don't care if you don't see it the text. It's only there to get past the spam filters.

I'm a Systems Administrator so I see some of this stuff that goes to "other people" people that are no longer there, never been there, never even heard of, accounts that have NEVER sent out an email, etc.

It's funny sometimes, since I see the spam sent to " a person" talking about their bank account, ebay account, etc. The number of emails that are rejected as invalid users, caught by spam filters, etc is staggering. I wonder sometimes what percentage of the spam sent out is actually to a real person. But they don't care, they can brag and say they have X number of different emails addresses that they can send to, at a cost of $$$, thats only $.01 per 1,000 or whatever the numbers are.

Mildoc no offense but IF YOU paid a spammer money to send something out, I might shoot YOU were it hurts.

[TB Roye]

I get a lot of Spam/advertisement where the body of the message is ok but at the bottom the is a couple of paragraphs of jibberish, what's with that? Look like some out a novel or "quotes from something. Very nonsencecal(sP)

Tom

[mpc]

A lot of that junk is searching for Outlook users that don't have strong security settings. Outlook, like most Microsoft products, supports a pretty powerful macro language... way more powerful than email really needs. And full of bugs/security risks. Especially with users that have "preview" turned on the email has a chance to run the macro even without the user opening the whole message... enough to install a back-door trojan, virus, etc. Anything to get a toe-hold into your system that allows further infestation.

Many many many security risks in Windows, Office programs, etc are from buffer over-runs: feed some normal Windows/Office program a totally nonsense input that's waaayyy larger than expected... the bulk slops off the side of the program's input buffer and overwrites other memory. Done correctly, that overwritten memory becomes a new program... next time you try to print or use whatever Windows/Office subroutine got overwritten this snippet is activated and it jumps on the web downloading the back door. A few months ago such a bug was found in the Windows graphics system; a properly malformed JPG file lead to an infected system. This was a bad Windows function - any program running under Windows was vulnerable: Internet Explorer, Word, photo editors, Firefox, Mozilla, etc... just avoiding IE wasn't enough in this case. Ever since then spam emails have included such JPG files.

I use a shareware program called MailWasher. It downloads a few header lines from my email server and examines them, categorizing them as normal, spam, probably spam, potentially virus infected, etc. It does not download the whole message, nor does it "execute" HTML style emails (amazon emails for example) so macro junk doesn't get a chance to run. It has lots of options for filtering/blacklisting/etc. to help narrow down the junk, then it'll erase the messages from the pop3 server. The crap never gets loaded to my PC... one more line of defense. And it saves download time over my modem.

mpc

[LYU370]

I get a lot of Spam/advertisement where the body of the message is ok but at the bottom the is a couple of paragraphs of jibberish, what's with that? Look like some out a novel or "quotes from something. Very nonsencecal(sP)

Tom

That's there to try and confuse the Baysian filters in some spam programs. We use SpamAssassin at work, (fabulous program BTW) and those types of spam actually help the Baysian filter rather than hurting it.

[MilDoc]

Mildoc no offense but IF YOU paid a spammer money to send something out, I might shoot YOU were it hurts.

You mean you missed my 10,000,000 spam offering a free BT3100???

Especially with users that have "preview" turned on the email has a chance to run the macro even without the user opening the whole message...

Good point. I learned long ago to turn the preview pane off. Everyone should.

[scorrpio]

Many dislike Norton, but I got NIS 2006 integrated with both Outlook and IE - so far it's been pretty good at keeping me secure. Scans emails and neuters any bad stuff before it can ever reach Outlook - then places into spam folder where I can review it if I want to. I usually take a look in there - especially when ordering from a business I haven't dealt with before.

Emails about my recent order from T-Nuts were all dutifully considered 'spam'. Had to tell it that T-Nuts was legit.

[dkhoward]

The ones that are really aggravating for me right now are the ones advertising so called "hot stock tips". The from address is obviously a spoofed address, the subject is usually a one word topic that is proably generated out of a dictionary database, the first part of the message is some type of graphic that has this really spiffy hot stock tip that is going to make me hundreds of dollars if I act now and the text of the message is cobbled together from some text source. From looking at them the text looks like it was lifted from different internet sites, Im betting by some kind of spider that simply goes out finds text on a website and pastes back into the email automatically so it will pass the filter test.

Our church email addresses are handling hundreds of these a week and I have found no way to filter them or identify them as spam without manually looking through them. of Course, our ISP is really being helpful and going NOTHING!

[MilDoc]

I nver look at "one word" subject line emails unless I know the sender's address. Otherwise - delete

[dick541]

Been a while, I use Earthlink, and use their spam blocker and pop up blocker and don't get any junk in my mail box. The program is great. Set it on high and U will only get mail from people in your address book. There is another file called suppect mail that all other mail goes to, and you can delete it without opening it. You need to look at it every day because you may get mail from someone that you do not have in your address book but need info from. You can move them to your address book,or just read it there and delete from there. If I order something online and get a reply from them it goes to the suppect mail folder, and not in my main mail folder.

dick