Why Spam Can Be Hard To Catch

February 27, 2008

So we all get spam every day, right? And while it definitely can be annoying, spam is so common and so prevalent now that most of us just ignore it. Hopefully you have a solution that deals with 95% of it (and if you don’t, let me know and I’ll help you out), but even for the 5% that makes it through to our Inbox, receiving the latest “get rich quick” or “lose weight fast” e-mail can be a major nuisance!

But at the same time, it’s actually kind of interesting to watch the spammers and see their latest techniques… Getting past spam filters is like a cat and mouse game between the spammers and the antispam companies who make the filters…it’s actually pretty entertaining! Today I received a piece of spam to one of my Yahoo! accounts that was selling (shocker here) Viagra… Except there was no misspelled words and no graphics…in fact there were no words at all. Rather, this spammer evaded detection by writing his e-mail with ASCII art. Sort of a combination between text and graphics….

I’ve pasted the contents of the spam message below for you to check out. By the way, in all seriousness, I do NOT recommend you visit the site advertised in the message, as some of these phony pharmaceutical web sites have been known to install drive-by spyware and other malware upon visiting. But an e-mail with this type of content underscores how difficult it is for antispam filters to catch every piece of spam. After all, there’s really nothing in this e-mail that would trip a filter…no suspect embedded images, no misspelled words…no words like “cheap”, “meds”, or “viagra”.

+1 to the spammers…

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