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How does spam get past searches and filters? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world to c/general@lemmy.world

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 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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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 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@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

Because it all comes in as Unicode.

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