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Somewhat gentler than Buy Cheap Viagra Online ;-)
Taxidermy P. Collateral
Is there a point to using names like that? I've never been able to get it...
You can probably guess that a few million messages being sent with the same name would look suspicious.
Spammers set the "From" address to
rand() rand(1). rand()
where rand(x) returns a word from the dictionary with a length of (x).
it ensures that every message has a unique "From" name, just one of hundreds of techniques used to avoid triggering spam filters.
You'd use exactly the same technique and it wouldn't tell people that it was spam just by looking at the sender name.
But perhaps the generalization is inaccurate. I'm sure lots of spammers are just script kiddies who downloaded a Russian bot with some built-in random-word features...
Allow us to aid you when obtaining your curatives
There's part of a chapter dedicated to this in "Spammer-X"'s new book "SPAM Cartel" (Syngress Press). Anyone here read it?
You scrape one of those "baby names" lists for first names
Mods, feel free to edit/delete this if it's too specific.
The baby names sites... this is the most ridiculous, strangest referal I ever get on my website. In 2003, as part of what I do, I descended into a sinkhole in Jamaica that had only been entered once before, by the Fire Dept, to retrieve the body of a small child that had been tossed in by a distraught mother several years before (the hole wasn't very deep, about 70 feet). There was no official name for this hole, and one of our responsibilities is to create an accurate list of caves/holes, with associated GPS positions, so we had to name this thing. It was my second or third cave/hole of the day, and how I recorded it was Dead Baby Sinkhole (everyone already knew it that way, and if you were to ask around for it, that description would find it for you). A couple of months after the notes for the visit went online, we started getting hits to that page from a "baby name" site, for searches of Jamaican baby names. I think people just saw it on the "baby name" site, and clicked through because it seemed so bizarre. We still get hits on it now.
Sorry for drifting off the thread topic and rambling. To get back on topic, any of the names that those spamming creeps use jump right out at you (I get hammered by them, man). At least the more unusual ones are somewhat entertaining when you delete them.
And then there's the Chinglish on a hand soap packet: "Another sparking product from Bee & Flower."
