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How does spam get past searches and filters? (self.general)

submitted 4 months ago by Omegamanthethird to c/general

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I get a lot of spam. In the subject it might say something about Home Warranty. The sender will say Home Warranty (the actual sender will be [email protected]).

But whenever I use my email's search engine, to delete all emails that say "Home Warranty", it can't find them.

Do people usually just ignore these types of emails?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Without getting too technical, it possible to write letters tbat look english but they are not. Tris technique is used to evade spam filters. Try copying the word directly from email subject and do search

[–] Omegamanthethird 6 points 4 months ago

Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

Actually, I just tried that for a bit. They're putting random zero-width spaces. So none of the words are actually full words.

[–] slazer2au 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

There is a really well known homograph where they say https://www.аррӏе.com/ but the A in Apple is cyrillic not ASCII.

[–] reddig33 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You’d think the server-side spam filters would be set up to catch that. Why mix two alphabets in a URL other than to do something slimy?

[–] slazer2au 4 points 4 months ago

Because it all comes in as Unicode.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It's the server doing the meddling, don't forget that! Email servers have two things to base an analysis off of: the trustworthyness of the senders header data and the content.

Header analysis will quickly kill messages from the fake servers but only after a certain amount of spam is identified - the computer doesn't "read" the alphabet, it just sees valid encoded symbols. It's the humans job to find the traffic lights, so to say.

And content analysis is a cold war of attrition: building better filters leads to better tricks leads to better filters, etc.

The only way I have found to stay spam free is customizing my address for each potential sender (i.e. [email protected]).that was a lot of work to set up though...