I seem to get many emails with paragraphs of nonsense words and
gibberish?  What are these emails and why do they get sent out?
Thanks,
Dr. C

Hello Dr. Crutchfield,

Email that comes with paragraphs of nonsense words and gibberish is
known as Hash Busting. Hash Busting is a technique used by spammers to
bypass spam filters.


Hash Busting:
Random insertion of characters or words used to defeat signature based filters.
http://www.securenode.com/products/products.html


?One technique that has grown in popularity over recent months is
'hash busting' - including text in emails that is not relevant to the
email itself.
Hash busting is designed to confuse Bayesian filters, which use
statistical probability analysis to identify spam trends. Random
groups of words, or freely available text such as chapters from
Kipling's Alice in Wonderland are added to the bottom of emails so
that Bayesian filters struggle to identify spam patterns?
IT Week 
http://www.itweek.co.uk/news/1157654


?The addition of seemingly nonsensical words is aimed at confusing the 
antispam filters that incorporate Bayesian analysis techniques, such 
as SpamBayes and SpamAssassin. These filters examine incoming e-mail 
messages and calculate the probability of it being spam based on each 
message's contents. ?

?By throwing a hundred or so random words rarely used in sales spiels 
into each e-mail missive, spammers hope to thwart Bayesian filters by 
making the spam appear to be personal correspondence. Incorporating 
words that might be used in legitimate e-mails is also intended to 
poison the checklist the filter uses, forcing it to mark, for example, 
e-mails with somewhat common words like Amazon and fish as spam 
indicators.? 

?The strange strings of words, which usually appear at the bottom of 
spam and sometimes in the subject line, are automatically added by 
spammers' mass-mailer software.?

"This random noise is technically known as a 'hash buster."

"Hashing" is a technique used by some spam filters to quickly compare
incoming mail to known spam.?
http://seclists.org/lists/isn/2004/Jan/0031.html


?To get around filters, some spammers have tried inserting spaces or
invisible HTML tags between words in their emails, or intentionally
mispelling words, so that suspect words will not trigger filters.
Other spammers incorporate 'hash busters' into their emails - erudite
and rare words, or large portions of out-of-copyright classic
literature. Either way, the resulting email, even if it does manage to
convince a machine that it is legit, will quite clearly be gibberish
in the eyes of a human.?
Circle ID
http://www.circleid.com/print/589_0_1_0/
 

?A hash buster is a program that generates a string of text for
insertion in a spam message so that, to a spam filter, the e-mail
appears to be a different message each time it is sent. The text might
appear in the Subject line, its From line, or after the message body,
and might either be coherent text or gibberish. The latter is
sometimes arranged in word-like formations to be less easily
detected.?
TechTarget
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci917491,00.html


Search criteria:

gibberish email
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=gibberish+email

hash buster OR busting
://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-23,GGLD:en&q=hash+buster+OR+busting


I hope this is helpful. 

Best regards,
Bobbie7

Fantastic job, as always.

My ISP has two addresses, both of which are interchangeable, one the
company started with and another, which is in fact the name of the
company, to which it is trying to move everybody over. So, e-mail
addresses such as abc@xxx and abc@yyy both work equally well. About
twice a week my antivirus software catches the SOBER virus but this is
always sent to the abc@yyy address which is the one I never use. I may
be viewing the whole thing too simplistically but if I was interested
in propagating spam or virus? then I would probably rip all the name
entries from the white pages telephone CD Rom or a CD Rom of first
names and combine these with all the possible ISP?s that are active in
that area. Maybe this isn?t how its done but does anybody know if I
changed the domain part of my e-mail address to something equally as
meaningless as the hash-busting jargon would this simple device deter
these people?

Btw, I don?t want to be too much of a smarty, so I will let Pink tell
you who wrote the Alice books. (I think you really meant to say
?Rudyard Kipling or Alice in Wonderland).

Capitaineformidable.

There was an interesting article in "Wired" a while back about hash busters:

Wired News: Random Acts of Spamness  
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,61886,00.html/wn_ascii

Thank you for the nice rating and tip!
--Bobbie7