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Filter-foiling Gibberish Becoming A Spam Staple
hcg50a writes "Wired has a story about the random words which have recently been appearing in spam. Antispam experts agreed that this isn't a brand-new technique, but said the addition of potentially filter-foiling gibberish is rapidly becoming a common component of spam."
A lot of the time that "random gibberish" comes in the form of a story or something. Hell, a while ago I got a spam that contained a few exerpts from The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. I got a laugh of that one.
My Mcafee Spamkiller ignores the white noise, and simply nukes all the mail containing viagra, etc.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
They are sending sekrit instructions to al-spamda about where to hide the weaponz of mass distraction. Or who knows. Any government efforts to control steganography (like reported just yesterday ) better go after spammers first, or we have to wonder what they're really up to.
We just need a lameness filter for spam that looks for non-sequiturs and other crap like O.,b|f-u.s,c;a,t.e,d W,.o.r.d.s.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
...is knowing how successful this spam becomes. I get a lot of it, and I have to think that you'd have to be beyond merely dim or technically inept to take it seriously -- you'd have to be insane or have some sort of debilitating head injury. (Granted, that still may leave a lot of the Internet covered, but still).
Spammers seem to have a lot of success when they're emulating more legitimate sources like Ebay, Microsoft, etc., but I get spam now that can't even seem to decide what it's selling. The subject line says "get rid of mortgage payments" and the body is selling "V.I.A.G.01331.A." I'm not even sure what I'd be getting if I were dull enough to actually click on anything in the message. Heck, I'm not sure if even the SPAMMERS know.
I'd be interested to know if these spams are as successful as past efforts have been.
This doesn't seem to be a very effective spam technique. It works pretty well at fooling my "bayesian" spam filter, but the spam messages have gibberish subject lines! Who's going to read a message titled "deprecatory parrot bizarre dessert"? (an actual example)
There is so much crap flooding my inbox these days that the spam filter is slowly becoming a whitelist of my coworkers and a few external customers. Hardly anything else that comes in is worth the time to look at.
I know that whitelists aren't the answer, but then nothing short of immediate execution of spammers is.
I have been pwned because my
Let's see... There is translation software out there that has some basic understanding of grammar. :P
Should we add a grammar-filter to the list of things we look for it spam?
A large amount of incorrect grammar would increase the chances of the file being caught in the spam filter.
Of course, this would lock out most of AOL users from writing email... But is that really so bad?
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
For example, take the word "Byzantine." This is a very non-spammish word. However, if you've never received a legitimate email containing the word "Byzantine," your Bayesian filter will not have it in its dictionary, and the word will be ineffective in "tricking" the filter. The red herring words only have an impact if they are relevent to your actual mail sample. Since everybody's email communication is different (some of us are programmers, some of us are literature majors, etc.), this is a real sledgehammer approach to defeating the filters -- and it's extremely ineffective.
This technique just proves that spammers don't understand the theoretical underpinnings of current Bayesian anti-spam methods. Otherwise, they'd be using much more common words as red herrings, instead of these extremely rare, and therefore insignificant, words.
I personally use a spam filter of my own design which is based on information-theoretic and neural network techniques. It kicks the shit out of spam, even the messages that include these stupid red herring words. The spammers once again prove that they are morons, incapable of understanding how anti-spam technology actually works.
randomly grab a paragraph from a book and include it with the spam.
It would also help spammers to write better pitches. Use real words, actual English but put it in narrative real world sceneario format. So it reads like someone you know telling you how they use such and such a product.
"I went up the cabin last week with my girlfriend and tried out those new pills I heard about while I was there."
There's pretty much nothing in there that would be filtered. And then a slight plug of the product name with a link and you're done. It's also Marketing 101 that the less of an ad sounds like an ad the more effective it is.
But none of that thwarts my method which is to filter based on the URLs of links found in spams.
I get virtually no spam with a Mercury rule file that's all of 23KB and grows very slowly as spammers use new domains to host their product pages.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The article doesn't do a good enough job of explaining the different techniques in use.
First, hash busters. Yes, spammers are loading a random jumble of meaningful words in meaningless sequences into their spam, usually in the plaintext message body of a message with HTML content (i.e., you get hash buster - html message with spam content - hash buster). So HTML-aware clients (the main clients targeted I'm sure are AOL and Outlook Express) show the spam message, but not the hash buster. I'm guessing that this is specifically targeting bayesian filtering tools at AOL (anyone know if AOL is using a bayesian filter?); it works by introducing words that would not be found in a spam corpus in greater numbers than those that would.
Second, noisy spelling, like v1@gr@. Obviously this is also intended to defeat regex-based filters like spamassassin. If you vary your cliches enough, and you introduce very strange, but easy-for-a-human-reader-to-recognize spelling variants, you make it much more difficult for filter writers to write effective regexes.
The real problem will be when the spammers finally figure out how to deliberately poison the Bayesian filters. So far they're using more-or-less random words, but that won't really work against Bayesian; it can tolerate that.
However, what constitutes "non-spam" is not as unique as most people think, as I've examined here. If they figure out how to deliberately put in hammy words, Bayesian will fall.
I feel OK posting this because I freely admit to this point I've overestimated them; I'm sure spammers have read that piece, and to date they have been too stupid to figure out what I said in plain English. But sooner or later one of them is going to figure out.
There's a strong core of "ham" that is "ham" for everybody, and sooner or later they're going to start abusing that.
And if I may forstall one objection... "But you don't understand Bayesian, it's [awesome for some reason and can't be beat ever, by anybody]" - I'll listen when you've actually written a program to examine filters yourself, OK? I understand it pretty damn well. It'll take more then bald assertions to convince me I'm wrong, I've done actual research, in the original sense of the word.
I thought about this after seeing my inbox spam increase to about 80 a day (the box that contains what is filtered is usually 10 per hour - my adress has been valid for just short of 10 years).
/usr/share/dict/words? I thought about trying this out, but have been too busy to get off my ass and do it.
Why not check the subject or first few lines of plain (not html) text and see if 80% of it is in
I saw one just yesterday that contained a list of important key sentences and phrases from the literature of common charities and political activism organizations.
In other words, if your Bayesian filter accepts those, based on your past decisions, it will detect the spam. If you reject the spam, you reject these communications as well.
Good filtering practice would dictate that one reads the junk box carefully enough to find both false positives and negatives. But the sheer bulk of mail that ends up in the junk box makes this unfeasible for many.
I have started letting these particular kinds of spam through, manually categorizing them (many words of random strings, dictionary vocabulary attack, positive phrase attack) in the hopes that filtering technology will soon advance to the point where these can be used as inputs to a more intelligent system.
Of course overhauling the mail system is a prerequisite to solving any of this long-term. For once I don't mind D. J. Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 proposals. Of course there are other proposed systems, none of which has enough momentum to start a slow steady change. The end result of any non-consensus system will be to fragment the worldwide network of Email into competing, noncompatible systems that need to communicate through some kind of loophole or gateway. Back to FIDO-net days.
Agreeing with this article, over the past week or two I have seen excessive about of spam being missed by SpamBayes, even after marking them as spam for improved filter, they continue to hit the inbox whereas previous absolutely no spam made my outbox. Additionally, there may have only been 2 or 3 emails marked as possible spam when they were not. And zero items mark as definite spam that were not.
SpamBayes has worked great previously, but now even it is falling short.
I feel as the spammers manipulate the conents/context of the spam, it will eventually become impossible to determine the difference without physically looking at 500+ email daily.
My primary use of email is business and not personal, therefore I cannot risk missing a client email, payment, question, etc... I've also see a progression of clients having MY emails deleted or caught in spam filters due to the business aspect and requests for payments. I feel this is primarily due to the comparison of too-often-common-phrases that a spam email and a business email contain. Such things as Click here to submit payment, or Buy these Products, Overdue etc... Even though all clients I email are only clients that contact me. I never cold-email anyone.
More spammer are using this random text as the only text in the subject and body, and using an image as the content of their email, which makes scanning even more complicated, if not impossible.
Being on the net prior to what is is today (going on 20 years), I often wonder how much control the spam actually has over the net in several aspects
- If spam were to disappear, will overhead costs decrease that greatly in order for ISP's to pass along higher saving to the consumer?
- If Spam were to disappear completely, how much faster would the Internet be?
Has anyone ever done a study to determine how much effect spam has on degrading the net, and what would it be like if all spam was gone tomorrow?Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
In addition to living in their own criminally delusional world, spammers often don't spam for themselves but work for others. They get paid by their, er, client for each message sent, it doesn't matter to them whether it's wanted or not.
Plus, there's always that .001% of suckers to keep the biz going if the cost of sending is close to zero.
What I don't understand about this type of spam is that often it doesn't contain any actual advertisement, just three or four lines of random words, and the end of the email right there.
I don't get it. If you're not selling a product, what is the spam for?
Mind you since TMDA, I haven't been seeing any spam anyway.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
It's old fashioned, and some of you will probably make fun of me for using it, but hey, I'm old school. FYI, here's my method:
;)
1. Create manual spam filters (NOT beyesian filters) in your inbox called "Friends and Family", "Work", "Services", "logfiles", and any others you find you need. Each category applies to a broad type of email address you'll receive email from. Then create a subdirectory in your inbox for each of these filters (named the same way, naturally).
2. For each filter, build a list of people who are allowed to email you. For example, your ISP, your bank, and your phone company would probably be added to services. Just add the email address they send their messages from to the list.
3. For each filter, have the filter move messages matching the filter (From equals ) to the correct subdirectory for the filter. Then stop processing for that message, so it doesn't get interpereted by other filters. Think of this as an analogy for ipfilter or ipfw in your firewall setup -- only you're filtering emails instead of packets.
4. Finally, DELETE EVERYTHING ELSE in the very last filter.
You USE this approach by doing a quick scan of the deleted items folder to see if anything is interesting. If not, just clean out those deleted items. It's a one step operation, much easier than selectively deleting a hundred emails one at a time.
Then, you scan each of the folders you set up, IF the folder has picked up an email, focusing only on your REAL email.
This approach has saved me a HUGE amount of work lately. My life is a whole lot easier, and it's way easier than trying to train a Beyesian filter. If I don't know you, you can't get too much of my attention.
It's all about being on the list, sort of like getting into a nightclub...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Just block the domain name/ip of the hosted images. Most spams I get come from random IPs but usually have common IP/domain name for the hosted images e.g.
hostz300001.com/ads/viagra.jpg
Or whatever. I've cut down from 50 spams to about 3 or so a day by doing that.
I bet a bayesian filter would work nicer but unfortunately I'm too lazy to mod the mail setup [that isn't mine] to get one installed..
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The solution to randomness is to spell check and grammar check incoming e-mail
.cf file
Apparently you've never gotten emails from either a:
1) 14-year old girl
2) Gamer
3) UNIX sysadmin describing a sendmail
Yikes.
1337 speak isn't a big deal. It's definitely filterable.
I've begun seeing chunks of text appearing in messages that are like legitimate mini-messages in and of themselves. Sort of like a counter weight. I don't think the aim is to pound Spam through the filters now, because what's happening is spam is getting slightly lower ratings each time while legitimate messages are getting slightly higher ratings.
In other words, the spam probably won't ever be legitimate, but it's making me lower my threshold for what is spam more and more. Eventually, I'll get to the point where some legit messages will cross over into being labeled as spam and spam will go through legit because the thresholds will be so close together as to practically overlap. It's also killing my ability to keep a spam trap that I can use to quickly train filters.
Whether this scene will actually play out and the "plot" will be succesful or not remains to be seen, however.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I keep praying for that silver bullet that will end spam forever.
The thing that seems so insane about spam is that it's gotten to the point where apparently all spammers care about is getting past your filters. They must know that you're going to delete the message the moment you physically set eyes on the word "\/1A6RA," but it's as if they don't care. They just want to induce you to look at the word, and force you hit the Junk Mail button or Delete key. They just want to waste your time filling your Inbox with their insane crap.
It's like they're nasty little demons spitting up madness from the bowels of hell for the pleasure of their horned master. I can't picture a spammer as a human being at all... I always imagine hooves and a pointy tail, a slimy, crooked red finger pushing its sharp, black, malevolent fingernail into an eagerly pulsating "SEND" button.
Read any interviews with these people? My god, they really are monstrous. The arrogance, the pomposity, and the self-justification spewing from each of their mouths combine to form a portrait of a person so utterly bereft of morals, ethics, or humanity that I just want to clip the spammer's photo out of the magazine, scan it, and send it to X-Wipes to be made into toilet paper. I'll let you imagine the rest.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... spammers have done more than their share in turning the wonderful information highway into a sleazy backalley of filth, perversion, and fraud. Every day as I wait for my email client to download and process the two hundred or so spam messages that are clogging up my inbox, I sit in silent hope, praying that someone will find a way to end the madness at the source, and cut the spammers out of our lives forever and ever, amen.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
The real benefit is to the spammers. They can put inline images that make the email look like it came from a legitimate company, they can have the text version look random, but the HTML rendered version human readable. Almost all spam is going to be HTML, and my experience is that 95% of HTML mail is spam.
Which means that if we filtered HTML most spam would go away overnight, and the bandwidth wasted by the remainder would be significantly reduced. We would also significantly reduce the security risks. Unfortunately the lusers that use services such as Yahoo! would also be filtered. I wonder if the decision to default to HTML is purely to satisfy the general customer, or a feature targeted directly to facilitate advertising.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Weird. I am talking about this at the MIT Spam Conference on Friday and on a technique that can break a Bayesian spam filter.
John.
I have had my main e-mail published and unchanged since 1995. It's probably on 99% of all spam mailing lists. One of my servers handles about 600 POP3 accounts. My stats currently indicate that now more than 80% of our SMTP traffic is confirmed spam.
I don't believe in content-based filtering. We have a strict policy of not examining in any way, shape, or form, the content of any e-mail on our network.
We deal with spam by implementing an array of fully-tested, fairly conservative relay blacklists which block the inbound SMTP connection before the junk mail is even transmitted.
In more than two years of operation, we've only confirmed about six legitimate e-mails that were blocked, and we handle tremendous mail volume. It's an easy matter to "whitelist" anyone who might end up getting RBL'd to make sure the client can communicate with who they want. In EVERY case where a legitimate source was blacklisted, it was shown their ISP was irresponsible and the listing was valid.
In addition to using RBLs, we also have an array of hard-coded IP blocks that our server will not accept mail from. This covers a good bit of the rogue Asia-pacific ISPs that are the largest source of open relays. Something as simple as blocking major portions of 61.* have shown to reduce spam by 30+%. Anyone legitimately in China that needs to communicate with our network can be quickly whitelisted. Ironically, most of the ISP SMTP relays are not near the same broadband IP ranges - they obviously know how effective this technique is.
With RBLs and hard-coded spamming in effect, instead of 200 spams a day, I might get 3-5. As soon as I get new spam, I report it to Spamcop, and I notice a quick reduction in future spam of that nature immediately.
We're now getting near the point of blacklisting the entire 24.* IP block as well - which encompasses, among other things, a large portion of Comcast IP blocks that Comcast can't or won't control.
I'd like to see more ISPs simply refuse to accept mail from rogue networks. Then these networks would have to be more responsible.
Let me preface all this by saying our policy is to whitelist anyone who complains they have legitimate mail being blocked. For some strange reason, we don't hear any spammers making these requests. That's a shame because I'd be happy to visit them personally to make sure their situation is resolved in a mutually-deserving manner.
I get a lot of spams with contain 3 random words in the subject. Currently, I collect the subject lines in a text file and arrange them to make poetry. A few sample verses:
i'll take this
open window into
imflammatory tales about
pieces of herring
shooting caused panic
that surely only
constituted a prelude
or else maybe
had ever happened
Worse yet, they keep spamming, Someone keeps buying from spam.
Why was this marked Redundant?
Maybe I missed someone else pointing this out, but it's a very important point. The spammers will only stay in business until it's no longer profitable. The technological solutions beat the legislative ones right now, but getting the word out to people that buying from spammers only encourages spam would really help too.
2- Most of the solutions to spam have involved ideas where senders pay or trying to swamp spammers with so much return junk that they get annoyed or driven out of business. Is it feasible to use an email system where the email content does not hop from one server to another? Just send the headers and where to get the content. In other words, when an email is sent, it would sit on the SMTP server provided the sender's ISP(s). That way recipients have to go and get it ( just like web pages, right?) It seems to me that would cut way down on traffic, could provide accountability, and alleviate the ridiculous burden on recipient's ISP to provide storage for every idiot that wants to send their trash to my e-doorstep. ISPs would be pressured to either charge for holding millions of emails until they're read, and at the same time quickley get blacklisted if they allow spammers to operate from their servers - and the sender ISPs know who they are, which might make it possible to get the actual spammers more directly. Seems like such a system might at least direct more of the cost towards the sender side rather than the recipient side.
It seems to me it would be much harder to poison a filter that did Bayes by splitting email into word pairs or triplets and assigning ham and spam probabilities for each. That way the bad grammar and random word lists would be extra-bad. I suspect longer sequences would become harder and harder to foil. They might require extra training of the database, but if you're getting lots of spam that isn't really a problem. Perhaps the word sequence length could be configurable.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Examples from my corpus:
VIAGRA: 99.797%
V!AGRA: 99.9999%
AGRA: 99.9999% (from things like VI.AGRA)
IAGRA: 99.9999%
PORN: 98.573%
P0RN: 99.9999%
PR0N: 99.9999%
Plus, the trick is looking for things that give away spam that aren't just words. I call them "characteristics." For example:
Various pharmacy related terms: 99.9999%
HTML using % escape sequences: 98.789%
Http:// references that don't use www: 85.538%
=?ISO- in Subject: 99.9999%
Suspicious domains (BIZ, BR, PRO, etc.): 99.174%
1 "Adult Term": 70.8%
2 "Adult Terms": 85.7%
5+ "Adult Terms": 99.9999%
5+ HTML Comments: 92.0%
10+ HTML Comments: 98.3%
30+ HTML Comments: 99.9999%
In short, there are so many aspects of a message you can analyze and make "Characteristics" that my Bayesian filter can often make a decision entirely based on the characteristics without even looking at some of the terms used within the message. But if the characteristics aren't damning enough, the content virtually always is.
So, the spammer sub-life forms start inserting filter-foiling gibberish, which has various effects:
It occurs to me, though, that if spam gets hard to read, no one reads it. If no one reads it, spam ceases to work. If spam ceases to work, spammers are out of work (sniff -- not!).
So when spam becomes so convoluted to get past anti-spam systems, it will become too convoluted to work. We can only hope.
The upshot is that it makes using nonsense words pointless.
Has anyone else seen a spurt of Habeas SWE headers in spam?
I'd never seen any until this week, and suddenly I've got like 5/day.
I forwarded them to the good folks at habeas, hopefully the spammer will get sued into oblivion, but it's forced me to re-score SWE with a much lower bonus in spamassassin...
http://habeas.com/servicesHowSWEWorks.html for those who don't know what I'm talking about, btw
Because of this, my baysean spam filter is gatering statistics as to what words/letters together create legible paragraphs, sentences, words, etc. I.e. it filters out paragraphs that aren't realistisc nor make sense.
That makes me wonder if all of this statistical data would be of use when it comes to some sort of Natural Language Processing.
Is it just me or do many of the spams lead no-where? I actually tried going to a few of them in my junk mail folder, and half of them are broken links! They must just like to annoy people, because they are getting 0 sales off a broken link (as opposed to %0.0001 response).
Also, it seems to me we need a pay per email system fast. There are a few holes to patch though. Imagine, person presses send, and pays their ISP say 5c. Already there are several holes, every ISP in the world would have to comply to stop spam. So change it round, a person presses send, and the destination ISP says "wait, you need to pay" -unless 5c is given to the receiver's ISP the email is never sent. Any ISP who doesn't have the software to pay the other providers will obviously lose their whole customer base, thus forcing them to use pay per email. Another hole is that legitimate newsgroups would operate at huge costs and businesses with many employees would be paying hundreds per day. So, make a deposit system, person sends email-5c is payed to receiver's ISP, and when they read it a button is displayed to give their 5c back. If not the ISP gets to keep a whole lot of 5c's (hopefully lowering prices)
If this were possible, spammers would operate at a huge loss, because no one would send back their deposit.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
Why don't we simply add a 'correctness' metric to our spam filters that runs a check of each word against a hash of all known words, such as that found in the parts-of-speech.txt file found at http://aspell.sourceforge.net/wl/ ... This would allow spam filters to detect 'garbage' most of the time, and flag for closer inspection.
Of course... This would also encourage people to spell-check their emails! Wooo!
Actually, I avoid deleting my spam. I have an archive now of over 270MB of spam that I can use for a training set for whatever filter I might intend to deploy.
That archive has more than just spam, mind you. It also has all the virus/worm email I've received over the years as well, such as the "Internet Email System" informing me of an undeliverable message, or "Microsoft Corporation" providing me a convenient, easy to click "December 2003 Internet Update" or whatever.
*sigh*
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
What if spam and the spammers software - was actually being used by a third party in a surepticious manner to send/receive messages? Kinda like plaintext stego. Maybe the software used by spammers is backdoored by this third party - he sends instructions to the machine(s), maybe via a virus or something simpler, the spammers send their messages, but "unknown" to them the spams have this garbage at the end. The spammer doesn't really care, maybe he bitches at whatever passes as tech support for the spam software. Most people who recieve the spam see the stuff as garbage, or filter busters. But a certain group of the third party's friends - they have special email software that downloads these spams, and strips the garbage out, decodes it, and reassembles it into the real message. Maybe each spam only contains the equivalent of a couple of characters after decoding (maybe the garbage is actually packets telling order in the sequence, and other info to reconstruct the message) - but over a week or so, an entire message could be sent...
What is the possibility of that? Occam's Razor suggests otherwise, and filter busters are probably what the stuff is - but...what if...?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
As time passes, more people figure out how to spam and more email addresses get snagged by harvesting. This will keep the flow of spam increasing exponentially no matter what curbs we come up with. At least it's creating a market for anti-spam products, as well as offering the larger ISPs something to claim they know how to defeat in their advertisements. Good for the economy.
Now what we do have a shot at getting rid of is real-life leafletting. Nothing pisses me off more than these Bush-approved illegals obstructing my path on the sidewalk to shove some piece of paper advertising cheap suits in my face. Maybe this is only something that bothers fellow New Yorkers though...
Spammers typically are looking for two responses to email.
1. Go to a website
2. reply to their email
The answer to 1 is to simply dump all embedded html. Problems solved. Nobody I know ever needs to send me email disguised as a web page. And yes mom, that means you have to lose that gawd awful floral background in all of your 'how are you son' emails.
The answer to number 2: (the other number 2)
What we need is not a better filter, we need a better response mechanism.
Spammers rely on the fact that smart readers who are non customers will not respond to their ads. This reduces the responses they receive to legitimate customers, people who are simply verifying their email address's by asking not to be spammed, and of course spam from other spammers.
What if instead of never responding to spam, everyone automatically responded to every spam with 'canned ham'.. seamingly sincere messages
filled with info culled from the spam itself.
Yes, please make my P3nis larger. 13" is no longer interesting now that everyone is growing beyond belief thanks to your wonderful products. Please send your wonderful pen!s enlarging kit to me right away. Do you need a credit card? Tell you what, don't use this email adress, use my hotmail address. areallybigone@hotmail.com
With everyone responding to all the spam but with no intent on following up on the correspondance the spammers inboxes will be flooded with responses from legitimate accounts all of which will seem like willing customers but will in fact be completely useless.
A few things. One is that it will render every mail list completely useless. It will give spammers a taste of their own medicine. It will vastly increase the amount of mail traffic for a very short amount of timing causing the ISPs to take notice and perhaps fscking do something about the spam problem. It will be mildly humorous in the short term to watch all the spammers drown in a sea of BS email.
Not necessarily. I'm sure most of those people (had to backspace over a few epithets) who spam Make Money Fast either lose money or get into legal trouble. But the damage is done (to me) before they learn that it won't make money. I think the driving force is selling spam services to gullible clients like these. (Not including the industrious Nigerians who seem to take a more personalised DIY approach.) Even if someone DID want penis-enlarging cream, I think by now they'd have a source of supply, that market must be pretty saturated by now.
I'm surprised that spam filtering software doesn't just just run a quick spellchecker on the email. So much spam tries to evade literal word filtering by clever spellings of p3nis and \/iagra. But if we filter out emails with too many spelling errors (and punctuation-addled non-words) in the subject and body, then all those clever ploys are for nought. (As a side benefit, more people would be careful about spelling in legitimate e-mails).
Fitering out misspelled emails puts spammers in a real quandry -- spell words correctly (and get filtered) or misspell (and get filtered).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm worried about spammers realizing that they can effectively negate the usefulness of filters without breaking a sweat (spammers, please don't read the following). If they switched from super-short fake messages to mock-real messages (a paragraph or two long, a legit-sounding subject, etc.) and they all sent out millions a day, everyone would be forced to turn off their filters. There would be no effective to distinguish those fake messages from real messages for most people (without a whitelist/blacklist system, which does more harm than good for most).
In such a situation, email would grind to a halt. Anyone who kept trying to train their filters would just end up blocking most legit emails, and those who don't train for it or turn off would be flooded with real and fake messages they can't distinguish between. The messages would even be profitable, so long as your "friend" included a link to some "cool website" that happens to sell [fill in spam product here]. Go ahead and train your filter to block emails containing URLs. Hah! Maybe if you don't have a job, friends, or buy things over the internet you can, but for most it's just not going to work.
G
when SCO, sorry CoS, were spamming ARS a couple of years ago it was possible to kill 99% of the spam just by computing the average word length in the spam. Ordinary humans generated messages with an average word length of 4.5 letters, CoS random word spam had an average word length of 5.5 letters.
I was surprised that such a simple test worked so well.
One day I must re-implement the test for email spam and see if it works as well.