[Techtalk] [OT] Garbage text in spam

Jessica Smith crystalsinger at mail.com
Tue Mar 4 00:06:36 EST 2003


Hi Dan,

At 3/03/03 12:06 PM +0100, you wrote:

>When I get spam, it often has a seemingly random string of characters at 
>the bottom. I assume that this is a sort of serial number so that, if the 
>spam gets reported, they will know who sent the report. Can anyone 
>enlighten me on this?

Random-ish strings are usually an attempt to defeat anti-spam software. If 
you look at some HTML e-mails you'll find that they contain comments within 
the HTML source with snippets of text in them (Mary had a little lamb... 
etc.) in an effort to do the same thing.

The spam engine inserts these semi-randomly into the spam to make them less 
formulaic.


Jess

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