Spam Patterns

Inevitably, it happens.

Every 2 weeks or so, some spammer cooks up a spamming scheme that reliably goes right past SpamButcher and into inboxes. Don't think we don't notice. The "main" accounts for SpamButcher (support, info, etc) collectively get about 450 pieces of spam each day. SpamButcher catches most (over 98% as of recent), but not all. The remaining 1.9% or so still adds up to around 9 emails. Enough to be annoying - and keep us on our toes.

It wasn't quite the intention, but by having our own addresses publicly listed on a high-traffic website - we've created an effective "honeypot." If you're getting a certain strain of spam, we're almost certainly getting it also.

It may take a few days, or even a few weeks - but we almost always "get our man." That is to say, we figure out a way to reliably detect the spam campaign. In honesty, this is surprising. Knowing spam blocking technology inside and out also gives me a really solid idea of what would fool most products (including SpamButcher). Surprisingly, spammers are either clueless, or just aren't will to undertake the effort.

A lot of email includes seemingly random passages of text. In a recent discovery, we figured out a lot of this text isn't really random, and it's not always stolen from other works either.

That is to say, the spammer (or some piece of software) created some kind-of-random text at some point, and has been recycling it ever since. Some of these random text snippets date back years.

So, now that we've identified that the phrase "Uncle chocolate dissects the computer" has been present in 2800 different reported spam messages over the last 2 years, we filter it. Odds are pretty good the same spammer, or someone using the same software will try to use it again. Although this next time, their email won't annoy users of the SpamButcher antispam solution.

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