Random Words

Hello All,

Not sure if this is the right place to post this. I have been curious about this for a while but never had a reason to ask until now.

When you receive and email, sometimes, mainly when you get them from spam, there is a line or a few lines of what seems to be purly random words at the bottom.

This is usually located after the body of the email and down at the very bottom, they almost resemble the type of keywords you would find in the "meta-keyword" statement in HTML. But they seem so random that they do not even relate to what the email is trying to sell.


Anyone have an idea of what these workds are for? Possibly some weird encryption key or something (now im grasping at straws :-) )

Please let me know what you guys thing, or if you have a rock solid answere please let me know!!!

the format that i mainly see on the emails is usually like so :

cat dogfish plant castle underground simple festival randome same passed leap picture
and so on......

Thanks a ton :-)

They're designed to get past a specific type of spam filter that work by statistical analysis of words that spammers typically use.
By throwing in some non-spam words they hope to fool the filter into thinking it's not spam.
It doesn't work with the latest round of filters though.

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2004/01/28/random

i believe thats the answer you were looking for ?

Google's your friend;)

Thanks for the reply. I knew it had to be something along those lines, considering I cant remember getting anything similar from a reliable vendor.

Thanks!

Thunderbird 1.0 with it's adaptive learning and customized filters has been the best thing I've seen in a long while. 80% of the mail I get never makes it to my inbox, hehe...sure, it took a while to learn and customize, but now it's rock solid!