DrBacchus' Journal

Confusing spam

I continue to find spam confusing.

Why would someone send out hundreds of spam messages, for example, with no body text? For a while, I just assumed that there was some attachment that I wasn't seeing because I wasn't using Outbreak, or that there was some hidden HTML. But, no, there's nothing at all. I looked at the mbox, and it's just a blank message.

The business of sending a misleading subject line I sort of understand - to get people to read a message that they would not otherwise read. But when the subject line is "load insect ambrosial", who's going to read that?

Oh, and here's a fun one. I've gotten several messages lately where it was apparent that the spammer didn't quite know how to use their software. For example, the subject line might be %RND_CHARS(8-20) which, presumably, was supposed to generate a string of 8 to 20 random characters.

Another thing recently has been a series of messages with the following subject line:

is could be your Ticket...|Don't let this slip through your fingers....|The Stars are the Limit...|It\222s your time to Come Aboard...|Don't miss the Train...To your Dreams...|Awesome Opportunity!|Secrets of the Rich Finally Revealed!|See What the "Heavy Hitters" do not want you to know!|Generate Massive Wealth!|Show Me!|Accumulate Massive Wealth!|At Last, Secrets of the Rich and Powerful Finally Revealed!|See What We've Never Been Shown Before!|The Last One You Will Ever Need!|WOW! Please Check This One Out, You Won't Be Sorry!|Staying' Home and Loving' It!|Opportunity Express!|Secrets of Internet Millionaires!|Change Your Future Forever!|Finally, an Answer to Your Prayers!|The World's Greatest Opportunity!|The Most Realistic Program Ever!|Top of the Line Opportunity!|Once In A Lifetime Opportunity!|An Opportunity You Can't Keep to Yourself!|This One is Really Easy!|You%}

So, I can only presume here that the spammer is a complete moron (I mean, even more than regular spammers) and could not figure out how to get the software to pick just one of the titles. The good news is that you can take that entire list and feed it directly into your spam filtering, and catch that entire category of spam in one easy step. Very helpful of them, don'tcha think?

Posted by rbowen at January 7, 2004 07:55 AM | TrackBack