What are meaningless sentences in Spam email for ?

[jk3210]

When those spam emails show-up that contain either one short, meaningless sentence, or some sort of gibberish like "uymuybm7nf9re87," is the spammer simply trying to verify that the email doesn't bounce-back, therefore indicating that it's a valid email target?

[graywolf]

They add random text so each email is a little different in an effort to fool the spam filter.

[jk3210]

Actually, the ones I'm speaking of have no body message or attachment. The entire email consists of something like:

"How is the weather."

[graywolf]

They may just be testing to see if your email is valid so they can resell it.

[sidyadav]

Yeah, I receive a lot of those:
"do you have the bug also?"
"This is an autoresponder. I'll never see your message."
"i found this document about you."

...I could just go on and on, but these messages that I receive always have a file attached to them, a virus (I-Worm/Netsky.C to be precise).

Luckily my e-mail scanner scans it and throws it away, while I add that e-mail address to my SPAM list.

I'm almost done with it!

Sid

[HelenDev]

On a similar thread, why are there loads of spam emails around at the moment with a bunch of random words at the bottom of the page like, 'republican television fruitbat widget etc. etc.' Does this serve a purpose?

H.

[Macguru]

Yes, I believe jk3210, is right. I read somewhere here that those meaningless sentences were randomly generated to form a unique tracking key.

[bcolflesh]

with a bunch of random words at the bottom

I guess it's possible to use those sentences as a tracking key, but the main reason is an attempt to thwart Bayesian filtering techniques.

[Macguru]

So I guess we talking about 2 different things here :

Spam entirely made of garbled nonsense for tracking purposes, and spam in wich nonsense was added in an attempt to bamboozle the latest filtering technologies.

[dillonstars]

Sometimes they have loads of random words to fool the spam filters in the text-only version, whilst the html version of the same email hides a picture and link to a more dubious site....

My email defaults to the plain text version so i rarely see the unsalacious html version that that would like me to see.