On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 09:02:30PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote: > On Tuesday 02 September 2003 19:00, Thomas Shaddack wrote: > > Spammers recently adopted tactics of using randomly generated words, > > eg. "wryqf", in both the subject and the body of the message. > ... > > Could the pseudowords be easily detected by their characteristics, > ... > > Presence of pseudowords then could be added as one of spam > > characteristics.
Many of them space the code words away from the rest of the subject text, i.e. "Subject: what if it were true? 5258pf2" I think this is to hide the code word since many mail readers only show 40-60 characters of the Subject. I've been id'ing spam by looking for excess whitespace in the Subject line for a couple years (it's one of about 200 checks my program makes). I'm sure other spam-recognition software does this as well. Eric