spam: there's something that's been troubling me

D

deviantchild

Regular
[They deleted the thread I was replying to, so I'm making a new one]

The almost de-facto standard of bad spelling and grammar makes me wonder if it's actually the spamming community's 'masonic handshake'!?
You may say "a-ha! but they're not native English speakers" but there are plenty of non-native English speakers on this board, and their written English is fine, better than a lot of native English speakers [as we generally observe] so, where the hell do they get these guys who write this stuff from?!
 
... and the truly sad part of it is, that even those moronic spam messages generate a lot of income. People might say they want to get rid of spam, but about 10% of them still buys that stuff anyway. Most of them claiming it's easy and anonymous. And with no-cost emails reaching millions of people, those advertisers make a very generous amount of money all the same.

And, those spam mails make lots of free, extra bucks to the big guys as well; don't believe the likes of Microsoft when they promise to put an end to it, as it would cost them a lot of money.
 
Zaphod said:
In most cases, the utter illegibility of spam is a trade-off between the desire to avoid Bayesian filtering and still attempting to get the marketing message across.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but not that - i didn't actually mean that. I meant the bad spelling and grammar, not the '1337 speak' style kind of thing that you speak of.
 
deviantchild said:
Yeah, but not that - i didn't actually mean that. I meant the bad spelling and grammar, not the '1337 speak' style kind of thing that you speak of.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. 99% of all spam is sent by bots or zombied machines, and is deliberately machine garbled.

It's not like there is some secret manual spamming bad-grammar society out there.
 
It was just a jokey comment, and you'd know what i meant if you saw the post I was originally replying to. I know what you are referring to but this isn't the deliberately garbled thing - it wouldn't get past any filters - just the sort of thing that has consistent misuse of past and future-tenses and things like that that you see a lot of. All looks like it could have been done by the same one guy. Maybe I shouldn't really have said "spelling" as it's more just the grammar that's bad.
 
No point. I'm not the one with the problem. It was this forum that got hit, and it wasn't a 419. Forget it, I was just making a joke about something I'd noticed. Nevermind.
 
And he didn't need to tell me because I already knew those filter avoidance techniques too. What I was on about was altogether more subtle. Just forget it please. It's getting to be like talking to an ALICE bot. Shut the bloody thread someone - delete it even. Bad mistake.

edit: [an example] "These marketinq tooIs will siqnificantly contribute to success of your business." - swapping q's for p's and upper i's for lower l's is common, but missing out the "the" before "success of your business" ain't gonna do anything as far as I can see. That is what I was on about. It's that that gives it a kind of universal style of broken English that, as you read, always sounds like the same guy - in my head anyway ;)
 
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Stats on the word "the"? (because there were already more in that particular mail) Well, they don't very often get through Thunderbird's filter - and, as I understand it, that's not a particularly advanced form.
Ho-hum... the world just got a bit more dull and serious - as if it wasn't already enough :(
I shall think first before making a light-hearted comment on here in the future.

ps. Public Service Dept.
Report all phishers here:- http://www.castlecops.com/pirt
If you wish, use a word processor's 'Find & Replace' function to take out private e-mail address information first.
 
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kyleb said:
Yes, I knew what you were getting at, and such "errors" do serve to fool Bayesian filters.
Click to expand...
Grammar errors could also be used to avoid hash checks. Other filtering techniques seems to catch attempts at adding blocks of pseudo-random or encoded information to the spam, but just having it mutate into different permutations throughout the spam run (remove insignificant words, random character replacements or insertions, and so on) may be more ‘successful’ at getting a portion of each variant through (that's the spammer's theory anyway).
 
What i will really never understand is why i get spam emails that are actually addressed to an email address that is not mine!! How does that happen?!
 
london-boy said:
What i will really never understand is why i get spam emails that are actually addressed to an email address that is not mine!! How does that happen?!
Click to expand...

Miracles of the modern age? I wouldn't worry unless your addy appears in the sender's field.
 
_xxx_ said:
Miracles of the modern age? I wouldn't worry unless your addy appears in the sender's field.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't worry about that either. Spoofing email headers is the easiest thing in the world, and the FROM address just as easy. A couple of years ago I saw spamware that picked the FROM and TO addresses randomly from addresses with the same domain (to increase apparent legitimacy, I guess) and put the real spam target in BCC (again on the same domain).
 
london-boy said:
What i will really never understand is why i get spam emails that are actually addressed to an email address that is not mine!! How does that happen?!
Click to expand...
Your address is in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) and so is not shown. You do get to see the To address regardless, which is not yours.

My ISP introduced an "X-Apparently-To" header a few years back so you could see which address was being spammed, even if it was hidden in the BCC.
 
Zaphod said:
I wouldn't worry about that either. Spoofing email headers is the easiest thing in the world, and the FROM address just as easy.
Click to expand...

I know, but tell that to Bubba who might think that l-b has been sending him all those "Get V1aqra online for cheap" messages...
 
Ah. I see what you meant now. I actually got a couple of 'why did you send me spam' messages from uneducated colleagues way back when. I still wouldn't worry about it, though, unless Bubba is suffering from severe side-effects from the hreb4l V1aqra and happens to know where l-b lives... :LOL:
 
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