Hunting Spam Oddities

Spammers usually aren't very good at creating emails that fool programs like SpamButcher. It may be that they fear no one would respond to a message without the pretty HTML formatting and images that spam so often includes.

A few also pay homage to the notion of being compliant with the law, which can be a give-away. The inclusion of the ubiquitous "unsubscribe" link is probably what gets about 90% of messages sorted into the "junk" folder.

It may also be that the millions of users who don't run spam blocker software make up enough of a market to target. Considering that sending spam has virtually no cost associated with it, this make some sense.

While most unsolicited email advertising is easy to catch, every few months a new wave shows up that presents some problems. I'll often get a "rogue" spam or two which goes uncaught. Less often, but more concerning is when I get 5 or 10 emails a day from the same campaign which go unfiltered.

We've been having the later problem for the last week or so. A very well thought-out campaign has been kicking out a lot of junk email. We weren't having any luck locating unique features about the campaign to filter on.

After about 45 minutes of staring at a message - I noticed something. There was a unique, broken piece of HTML which appeared in all the messages. Gotcha!

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