[CLUE-Talk] Gibberish in spam messages

[Warren]

"Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier" <clue at dissociatedpress.net> wrote:

 > My guess, and it is only a guess, is that it is a tracking method
 > for people who report spam.

I didn't think of that, but I guess it's possible.  On the other hand,
once you have information on who's reporting spam and are savvy enough
to mine that data, then what do you do with it?  I don't think that
there are any SQL gurus among the spamming crowd.  I imagine that
putting a spammer in a room full of chimpanzees lowers the average IQ
in that room by a few points.

I always assumed that it was some sort of "serial number" stamped on
each mass-mailing.  If you figure about 150 people are responsible for
90% of the spam, you have to have some way of tracking your mailings.

I'm seeing quite a bit of "encoded" spam messages - not plain text or
html, but some binary encoding.  I'm not using SpamAssasin yet, but the
traditional stone age methods - blacklisting, filtering sub-strings,
etc - and can't quite figure out how to block these.
 --

 </W>