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How does spam get past searches and filters? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world to c/general@lemmy.world
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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 randomwords@randomwords.com).

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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[-] schwim@lemm.ee 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Do people usually just ignore these types of emails?

Yes, for the simple fact that half of the half trillion emails sent every day is spam mail. Trying to do something with them is a fool's errand. Just delete and make the most of your day.

162 billion spam emails are sent every day, with 49% of the 333 billion daily emails sent, considered spam (numbers recorded for 2022).(source)

[-] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 months ago

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@lemmy.world 6 points 10 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@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

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@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Because it all comes in as Unicode.

[-] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 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. scipilemmy@mydomain.net).that was a lot of work to set up though...

[-] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Only whitelisted addresses go to my inbox, then I just check spam to see if there's anything I need to whitelist there (usually I'll know I need to check it if I've just given my email somewhere new) and empty it

[-] towerful@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago

What's you email provider? Do you use a program, or web app?

this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
18 points (90.9% liked)

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