Spam Blockers & Spam Filters are fooled by gibberish emails full of nonsense words. |
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What is the Reason for Gibberish Spam? Do spam emails with nonsense text work?
We've all seen cryptic e-mail messages that we just don't understand. You too may have seen them; they are those emails full of nonsense words in the subject line and in the message body. Typically these emails have nothing but funny-looking characters that don't look like letters. Many people have asked us what the reasoning is behind these strange cryptic email messages.
What looks like gibberish for the casual observer might be one of two things. Unintelligible text in a subject line or the body of an email is most likely spam written in a foreign language. Often email software chokes on foreign characters as your operating system does not have the language packs installed. Without the proper language pack for the email, your mail program is not able to convert foreign characters, e-mail programs display them as boxes, upside-down question marks, sun symbols, and many others.
At this time there is no effective way to filter out or block this kind of spam. However, I have personally had success with using message rules in my mail program. Find a piece of unique text either in the header or the body of the message and copy the characters and paste them into your message rules.
Random nonsense text in e-mail subject lines like "Hi c13u454opn545dd Yes U can!" and misspelled words are also designed to trick spam filters. By using misspelled words, like "best Rea| Estate qu0te!s," spammers hope to evade filters that use keywords to identify spam. Spammers are becoming more industrious, as you can tell in the phrase above. They are using strange keyboard characters that resemble letters of the alphabet like | to resemble the letter L or I.
Spammers need to start clueing in. Using weird character sets and misspelled words in their emailed ads cannot inspire customers to purchase their wares. Spam Blockers might not be able to filter this garbage out, but people are smart enough to press the delete key.
We received an email from one reader who said that studies have shown 1 in 10 receivers of spam email actually reply to it. - If this is accurate, it is important to educate your family, friends, and coworkers on why they must not feed these vultures. Actually buying product from a spammer not only is foolish, but it perpetuates the very problems we're discussing on this site. And remember, if someone is willing to trample on your desire to have a spam free mailbox, how likely do you think it is you will receive satisfactory product or service? Remember, the same tactics they use to avoid spam laws also keeps them safe from litigation should they be 100% fraudulent.
Something to think about.
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