From: Spike (spike66@comcast.net)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 00:02:37 MDT
On one of the lists I frequent someone mentioned the purpose for these
"nonsensical" lines in SPAM. What is the purpose? Is it to defeat
filters?
Terry
The word lists would reduce the ratio of spam-
filter words to total words, increasing
the chance the messages could get thru.
A spam filter is looking for words like
earn, penis, million dollars, bigger, viagra,
at home, extra money, Nigeria, etc. Of
course it would not be a good filter if
it nuked every message with any of these
terms. The spammers could send 10 thousand
randomly chosen words in font too small to
read along with their reprensible spam, and
probably get them thru.
Is this not a very real threat to the
internet in general? If it turns out that
spammers can defeat filters as long as they
send a megabyte of nonsense with each sentence
in their message, they will cheerfully do so.
Since bandwidth is free, they could devour it
with wild abandond.
spike
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