General Discussion

12066 readers

4 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy.World General!

This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.

🪆 About Lemmy World

🧭 Finding Communities

Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!

Also keep an eye on:

For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!

💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:

[email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
[email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
[email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
[email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
[email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!

Rules

Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.

0. See: Rules for Users.

No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
No Ads/Spamming.
No NSFW content.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Jessica

ElectroVagrant

fubo

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 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...