| We have all seen many spam emails that just make | | | | the message actually includes the sales pitch to sell |
| no sense. They contain pure gibberish in the subject | | | | pharmaceuticals, push the stock or even contain a |
| and body of the message, many times with no link, | | | | virus or worm. Many times the subject contains |
| no sales pitch and just seem totally useless. So why | | | | nonsense words or a recent news tag line and inside |
| do the Spammers send this junk? | | | | the message there will be a block of text that is |
| There is much more to it than you may think. On the | | | | entirely unrelated to the sales pitch. This text block |
| surface it just looks like they are trying to tick you | | | | appended to the message is sometimes a block of |
| off but under the hood it is much more cynical. | | | | text from a blog or website and sometimes is just |
| The main reason is the Spammers are pushing out | | | | random words stuffed together. Again, these |
| millions of gibberish messages is to confuse the anti | | | | methodsare designed to confuse the spam filters. |
| spam blocking filters. Spam filters that use statistical | | | | Spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in |
| analysis or Bayesian antispam filter are prone to being | | | | their attacks. You have probably hear these things |
| fooled by these as "good" messages and therefore | | | | 100 times, but they are worth repeating... to protect |
| change their threshold for allowing such messages to | | | | your inbox and your computer, make sureyou are |
| pass. This threshold or scoring method is what many | | | | running a good anti spam system on your mail server |
| spam filters like SpamAssassin use to determine if a | | | | and/or your personal computer. Also, do not open a |
| message is spam or not. This is also known as | | | | message that looks like junk, do not use the preview |
| stuffing the statistics and are simply self serving to | | | | pane in Outlook or other email clients, and do not |
| the Spammers. | | | | open attachments or clicks links in you email unless |
| Another method you will see used is very similar but | | | | you are sure of their origin. |