SPAM new genre

Does SPAM mutate?

[henry0]

This is really weird; about two weeks ago I added to my outlook a bunch of rules such as delete at once subject containing Viagra etc….

Since a couple of days ago I now receive SPAMs that have from and subject words unreadable like a putting together a few random alphabetical characters

Of course I delete those right away
But it triggers two questions:
A)If unreadable how does one even think opening it? (from a mktg stand point of view it does not make sense!
B)Even scarier is it possible that they could have figured out that I delete those automatically and react by sending the new “subject and from” made unreadable?

Their number is not huge; the few passing my server and other filters are only about 10 a day
However did you notice a similar pattern?

[jatar_k]

the trends are pretty interesting actually, if you have a lot of email accounts you can see the patterns change and move through all of your accounts. You see different trends with different webmail providers too.

A- you can view source in mail clients, that's what I do if something needs a look. You can't do this if you use preview pane but no one should use preview pane anyway.

B- they would be able to see open rates or clicks, as they decline then they would need to profile the declining pattern and then change it

[henry0]

So B is the answer
deleted or unopened triggers the same reaction

Well, at least I had a couple of satisfying days :)

[MatthewHSE]

A- you can view source in mail clients, that's what I do if something needs a look. You can't do this if you use preview pane...

You can in Outlook - I've been doing this for years.

but no one should use preview pane anyway.

I agree that in general the preview pane shouldn't be used to view spam, but surely it beats opening the message entirely, which allows scripts to be run and thereby opens another whole can of worms to deal with...

Or am I off in left field? ;)

[jatar_k]

originally the preview pane would actually execute anything that was attached

they may have changed that recently but it as like that for a long time

and a preview is the same as an open for images, etc

[henry0]

Most MS tech sites will not advocate using the preview pane.

I was a good tool yeaaaaarrrsss ago

[MatthewHSE]

I get what you're saying about images, etc., which is becoming more important of an issue all the time. But what I'm wondering is what alternative you have to the preview pane. You either use the preview pane, or you double-click a message to open it all the way. In my version of Outlook (2002), the preview pane displays images but does not run script. However, opening a message *will* run script. Therefore, although far from perfect, the preview pane seems like the safer concept to me.

Assuming, of course, that you have good spam protection. I have SpamBayes running around 99% accuracy - anything that makes it into my Inbox gets the preview pane turned off before I click on it at all, which I normally only do long enough to hit the "Spam" button, or, if in doubt, to check on the message headers. My "Junk" and "Junk Suspect" folders have the preview pane turned off entirely.

So back to my original question (which I should have worded better in the first place), what is safer than the preview pane? (A different mail client would help, but that's not always an option...)