Skip to main content

The last gasp for pathetic email spammers

I saw this in my inbox today:

From: dissembler@sevendegreesofbum.com
Subject: Ado6e Acro8at 8 79 $, 5ave 599.95
Body: Vlsi+ cheapxp4pc .com ln 1nternet Exp1orer.

This is so truly pathetic. Yes, it managed to get past gmail's spam filter. So what? It's so blatantly obvious that this is spam that one can just delete it without reading it. Out of the hundreds or thousands of spam messages that end up in my gmail spam box, this is the only kind of message that makes it through of late, and it's only rarely (one or two out of thousands!)

Here's what's interesting:

  1. There are no recognizable, click able URLs in this email
  2. Every word in the email subject or body is misspelled with a number in the place of a letter

Here's why it's pathetic:

  1. The spam filters are getting good at detecting spam -- so good that spammers must mangle their missives to the point where the message is nearly unrecognizable to humans.
  2. It should be possible for spam filter writers to detect words with certain types of 'signature' misspellings like this - '1' for 'l' (ell), '5' for 's', etc.
  3. The spammer is now reduced to telling the recipient to visi+ (er... visit) a web site by typing in an address in 1nternet Exp1orer

I think email spammers' days are numbered. The spam hunters are closing in. You can run, but you can't hide.