We have all seen many spam emails that just make no sense. They contain pure gibberish in the subject and body of the message, many times with no link, no sales pitch and just seem totally useless. So why do the Spammers send this junk?
There is much more to it than you may think. On the surface it just looks like they are trying to tick you off but under the hood it is much more cynical.
The main reason is the Spammers are pushing out millions of gibberish messages is to confuse the anti spam blocking filters. Spam filters that use statistical analysis or Bayesian antispam filter are prone to being fooled by these as "good" messages and therefore change their threshold for allowing such messages to pass. This threshold or scoring method is what many spam filters like SpamAssassin use to determine if a message is spam or not. This is also known as stuffing the statistics and are simply self serving to the Spammers.
Another method you will see used is very similar but the message actually includes the sales pitch to sell pharmaceuticals, push the stock or even contain a virus or worm. Many times the subject contains nonsense words or a recent news tag line and inside the message there will be a block of text that is entirely unrelated to the sales pitch. This text block appended to the message is sometimes a block of text from a blog or website and sometimes is just random words stuffed together. Again, these methods are designed to confuse the spam filters.
Spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their attacks. You have probably hear these things 100 times, but they are worth repeating... to protect your inbox and your computer, make sure you are running a good anti spam system on your mail server and/or your personal computer. Also, do not open a message that looks like junk, do not use the preview pane in Outlook or other email clients, and do not open attachments or clicks links in you email unless you are sure of their origin.
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