Ace Spammers

SpamButcher is quite good at filtering spam, but unfortunately some spam still gets through.

When I see this happen on any of my own accounts, the offending messages are closely analyzed. Spam sent by users to spam@spambutcher.com is also analyzed - but usually by an automated process to gather statistical data.

What's become apparent is that there are a handful of spammers capable of running campaigns that solidly understand how to bypass spam blockers. For the record, this isn't that hard to do. It just seems most spammers don't bother to do the research. This is surprising considering how easy it is to determine if a piece of spam email was delivered or not. Spammers frequently utilize tracking images to monitor the deliverability of their email.

Most of the messages are highly obfuscated. Often they contain little more than randomized text and a garbled URL. The effectiveness of these messages is presumably low. However, I'm always amazed how readily some people will simply click on something when they are unsure what it will do.

More concerning is that some messages that slip past filters still maintain good readability. I've specifically noticed this with certain finance related spam.

Messages saying, "this is our last attempt to contact you regarding your opportunity to refinance" seem to make to my inbox on a near daily basis. The exact text of the message is generated fresh for each message. Simply adding these phrases to the anti-spam program code likely wouldn't remedy the situation.

Fortunately, almost all campaigns I've monitored to date appear to have certain detectable patterns. Once determined, they go into the latest build of SpamButcher.

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