

Why do spam emails often contain gibberish? - honksillet

Why is it that spam emails often contain gibberish?  What benefit does this yield the spammers?
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bediger4000
My belief is that the spammers believe that putting gibberish in emails can
get those emails past a larger fraction of spam filters. I expect that does
happen, although I don't use a spam filter on my personal email. I can imagine
a spam filter marking something as spam for short length, presence of certain
keywords, or presence of a number of words together. Adding gibberish would
increase the length and dilute the keyword's percentage of the total text.

Possibly the appearance of gibberish is to filter out even slightly
sophisticated potential victims. In
[http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf)
Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research shows that spammers want stupid, stupid
people as victims and might deliberately include misspellings, gibberish and
outlandish claims to let smart potential victims filter themselves out.

I doubt you can discount any possibility, up to and including things like
"spammers are so stupid they don't notice the gibberish", or "spammers buy
really stupid spamming setups that put gibberish into the emails". Given the
prevalence of backdoors in underground products, it's hard to put anything
past spammers and those meta-parasites that prey on spammers.

~~~
v2interactive
I always assumed it was to validate email addresses and filter out bounce
backs. The above is a very interested theory and publication.

