what's the deal with gibberish spam?

July 17, 2005 12:09 AM

what's the deal with gibberish spam that doesn't sell you anything?

Every so often I get gibberish spam (let me know if there's a more formal term for this). They have nothing but random non sensical sentences. I know they're put in there to try to get through spam filters but these messages do not have any links or any information on any product whatsoever. What's their purpose?

posted by sammich to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Maybe a hidden image that goes back to a server to confirm that your address exists? The gibberish could be a way through a weak spam-blocker. That is pure speculation.
posted by socratic at 12:25 AM on July 17, 2005

Best answer: The idea is to overload spam filters that learn (where you teach it what is spam and what is not). When you mark these nonsense messages as spam, the nonsense words corrupt the spam filter with everyday English words. This gradually renders it useless.
posted by rolypolyman at 12:27 AM on July 17, 2005

That's a very cogent tactic, but won't it backfire when people utilize other types of spam blockers?
posted by Monochrome at 12:39 AM on July 17, 2005

Sometimes spam messages with a typical spammy text/html version have a text/plain version that's just gibberish. Thus, if your mail reader is configured to display the text/plain version of MIME messages by default, you may not be seeing the actual spam "content".
posted by bpt at 3:19 AM on July 17, 2005

I know I'm old fashioned but I read all my mail via Pine. That way nothing gets back to my computer. I delete the junk and maybe once a week I download the rest to my home base.

I like pine because it's easy to telnet from wherever I am.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 5:24 AM on July 17, 2005

As bpt said, some spam has the sales pitch only in html or graphics. For a while, I got spam that had a snotty "Get a better email program" message. Sheesh. So many reasons not to use html in email; I use text only.
posted by theora55 at 6:49 AM on July 17, 2005

1.) It could be a newbie spammer who's still figuring out his new spamware.

2.) He could be testing addresses to clean his lists

3) He could be running variants to test spam filters in the wild. You're just in there to help the filters notice him.

4) Could it be that there is a link but your software is not showing it clearly? I sometimes have to poke around to find the actual payload in a spam.
posted by Ken McE at 6:52 AM on July 17, 2005

I've always wondered about this.

So, rolypolyman, when I get these types of message, should I not flag them with my anti-spam software (I use MailWasher)? Will that corrupt/confuse/render useless over time its efficiency? Should I instead just delete them without "bouncing back"? Thanks!
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 7:24 AM on July 17, 2005

I like pine because it's easy to telnet from wherever I am.

I do hope you're using "telnet" as a generic verb meaning "ssh"!

Back on topic, in the last year I've started getting empty spam (which I'm reading with elm, so I know I'm seeing all the characters sent). No words, no links, nothing. Is this just to see if my email address isn't dead?
posted by Aknaton at 7:30 AM on July 17, 2005

A couple of years ago, TechTV's "Screen Savers" did a study on spam and found that the vast majority of it was not intended to sell anything at all, but rather merely to harvest email addresses of those foolish enough to read spam. It seems that most spammers make their money not from selling products, but rather from selling lists of valid email addresses. So socratic'sidea about the message either containing hidden images to flag the address on the server and/or rolypoly's idea about being designed to confuse spam filters would most likely make sense.
posted by robhuddles at 8:53 AM on July 17, 2005

ObscureReferenceMan, you should still mark such messages as spam. Those messages still use some of the same tricks as messages that try to sell you crap and contains some of the same quirks (like malformed headers), so flagging it will still help your spam filter learn.
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:02 AM on July 17, 2005