Efforts at Obfuscation

A few times a month I end up sorting through the spam that's missed by SpamButcher's spam fighter. A lot of it is stuff that makes it into one of my accounts. Some of it is missed email reported by end users.

Pretty much everything that's slipping past is using at least one type of obfuscation. One of the easiest types to implement is simply misspelling certain known trigger words in the message.

The core research has already been done as to what content spammers are pitching. At this point, anti-spam filtering systems are going to pick-up messages with blatantly commercial content. Spammers have had to resort to coding their messages in a way that end-users can read, but spam filters can't.

I've seen many email messages that seem to be nothing but randomized text and a link. Having a background in marketing, I really have to question who purchases from these kinds of email. On the other hand, I'm amazed that there are people who purchases from spammers in the first place.

The good news is that as messages become increasingly difficult to read due to obfuscation, it becomes easier and easier to for a mail filter to detect that someone is attempting to hide the actual message content. That alone can be a strong indicator that the message is spam.

Back