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In some of the spam e-mails I receive, I notice that at the bottom they write sentences with normal words, but the sentence itself doesn't mean anything; they just put random words side by side.
Do these have a purpose? Is there a way to distinguish the real meaning of what is written?
The purpose is to get you to open the email, which you did. I suggest you run AdawareSE and spybot Search & Destroy.
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They are phishing for passwords, etc. It's best to just delete this trash. But opening an email won't hurt anything. so long as you don't open ANY attachments. And don't click on any links in the email. sometimes I open one of these emails just to see what it says. It is usually gibberish. Soon enough they will be caught and they will pay dearly for their deeds. It's happening every day, now.
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Opening the Email does hurt something. It tells the sender that your address is valid. This means it will move up to a new list of good addresses used for more spam.
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"Do these have a purpose"
Yes. The purpose of putting random words or strings of words in spam email is to attempt to circumvent Bayesian spam filters."Is there a way to distinguish the real meaning of what is written?"
See the above three posts. The purpose of all spam is to, in some way, get your money.PC Bob: "Soon enough they will be caught and they will pay dearly for their deeds. It's happening every day, now."
Really? Can you link to an instance of this happening?
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Hill, the way they know your email address is not valid is not done by opening emails, its done if they dont receive mail daemons back. Your ISPs mail servers will return a mailer daemon if it finds the email address doesnt belong to it. The email donesnt even need to be downloaded before they know if your email is valid or not.
iamc, I agree with you, its the get passed the spam filters...and spammers are getting pretty good at it. Personally, I use MS Outlook 2003 Pro, it has downloadable spam filters that I always keep up to date.
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Out-look BAAAAAAAAD , fire burns!
Hey , your only choice is to live with it, I remember AOL running a competition for some one to win a porche that they got in a law suit against a spammer... so it can happen... I think that put a .00000001% dent in the spamming scheme... really people... you need to accept that spam and email go hand and hand, though i find filters very enjoyable ^_^
I actualy find the counter genius to the filters even more amusing...
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Monk
A question for you. If the spammer already knows he has sent to a working address then why would they bother to screw with the Yahoo filters. I did open some spam on request of my local Sheriff dept. This spam had diabled my ability to mark it as spam. We all know they keep altering the spelling in order to get by the spam filter. I guess I am not convinced of what you say. By the way if anyone is curious, I contacted my sherriff's office because I was getting 4 to 8 offers to buy narcotics like Vicodin. These are controlled substances, therefore law enforcement is interested in these Emails. By applying filters I have cut it down to an occasional one.
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I wish I could point to one instance of a spammer getting burned. Usually, you hear on tv or the radio about some little guy getting burned. Unfortunately, I think the big guys are too smart for them and instead we are the ones that get burned. I can't see anything good or commendable about spam. May they all burn in hell.
At work we use Lotus Notes for our email and when we are out of the office on vacation I used to put an out of office genie on. But that just let's the spammers know that they have an active email address, so I don't use it anymore. Also, our email administrator automatically sends a message back when it receives a virus or whatever. Again, it just verifies the address is active. Solution? Delete the stuff unopened. After awhile they go away. I get the spam for controlled drugs, too, and have wondered if there wasn't some way to nail them on it. How did that work out, Othehill?
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