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Nonsense Spam makes sense to spammers?

Is anyone else getting hundreds of pieces of totally nonsensical spam?

An example would be, “amethystine deluxe, dividend bethesda astrology, butyrate approbation“.

There’s no link to click on… nothing’s being sold, so what’s the point of “Nonsense Spam”? Why would someone send junk email like that?

Well, if nothing’s being sold, there must be a value in actually sending the emails. Presumably, some mega-computer is analyzing the bounce messages from their mailout… the spammers can then work out which “Nonsense spam” emails were delivered and sell the email addresses.

It’s actually quite clever because it also hurts the Bayesian spam filters. If users label these “Nonsense spam” emails as junk to a third party such as Cloudmark, the filter will consider the words and context of the email when building its algorithm. So if actual users feed the filter random junk, the algorithm will, presumably, become less effective.

So the spammers get a list of deliverable email addresses as well as hurting the spam filters. :-(

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Current posts, anti-spam tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “Nonsense Spam makes sense to spammers?”

  1. Bl4mp Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 11:14 am MyAvatars 0.2

    Neil,

    Well spotted.

    I never thought of the damage to the spam filters.

    It would be interesting to know how much Internet traffic is just bounced messages. Personally I don’t bounce anything. All mail to unknown addresses on most of my domains are either delivered to the default address or dropped depending on the application..

    Genius mate.

  2. mattg Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 2:53 am MyAvatars 0.2

    The latest I’ve been getting is spam that has no text but has a pdf attachment with the spam message in it, so be careful with pdf’s that you’re not expecting.

    Whenever I set up a new website I set the default address to :blackhole: so that anything that comes to xyz@domainname.url instead of the real address is just dropped.

    This helps to make sure you don’t end up using all your hosting space with one BIG inbox full of junk mail.

    the other point about bouncing email is that it let’s spammers know that there is a legitimate email address somewhere on that domain, so they can keep targeting it with other variations@….

  3. John Says:
    August 1st, 2007 at 10:12 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    I’ve heard the “fool the Bayesian filters” explanation. Does it actually work? Has anyone ever heard of someone actually shutting off their filters after getting a bunch of these? I have to think the return rate on this technique must be minuscule (I use Mailwasher, myself, and it kills every one of these with no loss of legitimate mail).

  4. Marc Says:
    September 5th, 2007 at 8:59 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    Hi, Neil

    I want to buy & download your Auto Income Secrets. I need
    a Free pdf reader. Wich one would you recommend? Thanks. Marc.

  5. Neil_Shearing Says:
    September 6th, 2007 at 12:22 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    Hi Marc,

    Download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader from, erm, Adobe. :)
    http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

  6. Thomas Beagle Says:
    October 29th, 2007 at 11:02 am MyAvatars 0.2

    Hi, I’ve come up with a different theory about nonsense spam that I suspect might be a better explanation. In a few words - the spam bots are failing to connect to the spam ad-servers, and are therefore sending out spam messages with the counter-measures but not the ad-copy. I expanded on it slightly here: http://thomasbeagle.net/2007/10/29/why-do-we-get-nonsense-spam/