Scrambled Email Messages

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Scrambled Email Messages

Richland

1:52 am on Oct 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have been receiving a number of scrambled email messages with sentences all mixed up. The senders are from addresses I do not know but they are not being picked up in the spam folder. Any ideas as to what this might be?

jtara

4:05 am on Oct 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

It's either spam (was there a URL anywhere in it?) or it is intended to pave the way for spam.

Meaningless but keyword-rich text that does not use spammy keywords can be used to throughly confuse a certain type of spam filter - Bayesian filters.

A Bayesian Filter can't tell the difference between this and meaningful text. It won't see it as spam, and will even use it to "train" itself into thinking it is NON-spam, and so to keep it's hands off of similar mail arriving in the future.

Not much info on Wikipedia, but at least there are a couple of links there:

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Richland

3:51 am on Oct 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

Thank you for getting back. The information you gave is very interesting. Each time I have marked them as SPAM and do not remember if there was a URL.

jtara

4:38 am on Oct 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

Here's the worst aspect of this: if you train a Bayesian filter to classify this as spam, it will eventually start classifying GOOD messages as spam.

What is needed is a filter that can be put in front of a Bayesian filter that will recognize gibberish.

MatthewHSE

1:17 pm on Oct 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

I get these all the time. SpamAssasin (on my server) unfailingly tags them as spam, and the SpamBayes Outlook plugin (on my PC) sends them right to the Junk folder.