Spammers Use Misspellings to Fool GMail Spam Filters
GMail spam filtering algorithms are pretty good at detecting text spam messages. The moment you receive an email about a Pharmacy store selling Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, Valium and other pills, GMail will mark it as spam.
Then entered image spam where the text message is sent as a picture attachment to bypass the spam filters.
There are effective methods to beat image spam but the latest spammer trick involves sending email messages with misspellings of words as you see in the screenshot above.
The word Viagra has been spelled as \/laGr@ - the first alphabet is not "V" but a combination of a back slash and a forward slash. The second alphabet is "L" instead of "i". No wonder, Gmail failed to detect this message as spam and delivered it to the Inbox.
And there's more - the image attachment, that has the actual advertising message, is scribbled with short horizontal lines so as to trick the OCR software that can extract text from images.
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Reader Comments:
My gmail account has been getting a lot of messages that say ***SPAM*** in the title. Now I don't understand why they aren't being picked up but they too seem to have found some way around the filters.
Misspelled spams have been around for years. I remember seeing things like \/i@gra almost as soon as it came in the market back in the 1990s...
It's those image spams with associated garbage text that are relatively new and then there are the meaningless spams that are just random scrapes of web pages and don't actually contain a link or any advertising. I really don't understand those. they must be a subversive plot to make the net grind to a halt...
db
Misspelling is another way to implement pharming
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