Email Subject Spam

I find it interesting when a reasonably legitimate service (eWeek magazine, in this case) sends out an update with asterisks in the subject line so that spam doesn’t actually read spam. Instead, it is sp*m. Presumably this is to foil filters that look for spam in the assumption that true spam will contain spam in the subject and the email can be safely deleted.

We get a lot of spam, and very rarely does it contain spam in the subject line. Even when it does contain spam, I can’t think of a single instance where the sender of the junk mail has taken steps to protect it from triggering a filter on the word spam.

Just glancing through the mailbox of stuff that kicked out this weekend, I see lots of umlauts, slashes between each letter in sexual, periods in commons spam words such as humungous (sic), cheapest and effective (two periods in that one), and even a tilde in grow. But out of 500 or so junk emails, not a single occurence of spam, in either altered or unaltered form.

It’s interesting that people think that those who send junk emails will actually advertise that fact by including the word spam in the subject. Not just people, but a publication devoted to technology. Do these people really live in the same world as we do, or do they occupy some alternate dimension where those who send junk email actually let you know that that is what they are doing by including it in the subject?

Don’t get me wrong – I understand that some junk mail does come in with spam in the subject. But at least in our installation, that happens so rarely as to be a non-event. The handful of messages that slip through are much easier blocked by a sender blacklist than a keyword check for spam.