

Ask HN: What's this email about? - jonp

I just got sent this. I'm guessing it's spam of some sort. But what purpose does it serve for them to send it?<p>from: aisiku9200@rr.com
subject: village strands Widely few<p>British he Mifflin
======
aphyr
This is an attempt to poison your spam filter. By forcing the filter to
discriminate between good emails with English text and innocuous words, vs
spam emails with English text and slightly different innocuous words, the
filter can't discriminate as accurately and may misidentify good emails as
spam. In order to combat this we (sometimes implicitly) change the threshold
required to flag an email as spam, and allow more spam email through.

(My guess is this doesn't belong on HN, though.)

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dotBen
a) to see if it bounces (if it doesn't then they can sell it as a valid email
address)

b) to test anti-spam trigger words by seeing if you receive it or if it
bounces due to spam.

~~~
rcfox
c) To confuse adaptive spam filters to either allow spam through, or cause it
to flag legitimate email.

