The Strange Emails

(posted this to another thread but thought it might deserve its own thread after I did.)

I've always wondered what is up with those emails that are full of random stuff.

Better, the ones that have hidden text in them - that you only see probably if you are a "phantom clicker" like I am. I like to randomly click on my mouse and sometimes randomly highlight things on my screen by dragging and selecting sections.

Quite often in those emails, this phantom clicking/highlighting reveals areas with random crappola that is transparent. The font is set to the same colour as the background.

Sending information by spamming would work for undercover work.

Everything has to go through ISPs, and there are still major backbone hubs. If you spammed it, eventually some of it would end up on your controlled backbone. You could have ways of recreating a final message by reconstructing the packets of message incased in emails.

Packet handling for computers - only done with literal messages spread out in the over all traffic of the Internet.

Anyone else?

[edit on 2009/10/19 by Aeons]

Here's an example of a penis enhancement one in my junk mail today.
Best thing is that junk mail is not looked at by people.

*SNIP* ElevenY earsA g o,He 'dTh ou ghtI tWasB a dEnoug hThatS eren aBu tlerHadU surpe dHisPr imaryP os it ionAft e rAllHe HadWo rkedToA cco mplish. N owT heWholeJ ihad WasAbout ToBe Ruin edBy AnA bsurd PeacePr opo sal.ItC ouldNev erWork. HowC ouldKe atsAndT heOth erSecon da rie sHav eFailedS oUt terly? Didn't TheyUnd erstandW hatTheyH a dDo n e?

or this one that has a story attached.

SuperViagraWillMakeYourPenisLive.

*SNIP*


Bibulus altogether, and taking the two names of Caesar to make out the
tracts of cultivated land, the slopes of the hills and the mountain
him on business of common interest, he would state the particulars that

I'll keep looking for an example of a "hidden text" email.

MOD NOTE: Please do NOT include any of the links you get in these spam emails in this or any other thread on ATS. See the following: ATS Terms & Conditions

You will not use your membership at The Above Network, LLC site(s) for any type of recruitment to any causes whatsoever. You will not post, use the chat feature, use videos, or use the private message system to disseminate advertisements, chain letters, petitions, pyramid schemes, or any kind of solicitation for political action, social action, letter campaigns, or related online and/or offline coordinated actions of any kind.

Thank you

[edit on 20-10-2009 by burdman30ott6]

reply to post by Aeons


What the hell are you talking about? Are you crazy?

The text is random in an attempt to bypass spam filters which use keywords (verbatim, hence upper and lower case mixed, "ThIs" isn't "this"). Likewise with the copy/paste stories which try to bypass body/subject matter filters. Most spam is generated electronically, there really isn't any more to it all than that. Not quite sure where your "hidden text" fits in. It's just spam.

[edit on 19-10-2009 by quackers]

I'm sure that most of it is spam.

However, spam would be perfect cover for transmission of actual intelligence.

If I can consider it a good method for sending and reconstructing messages, then surely someone else has too.

Why bother? You can use many methods for that without sending your message to millions of unwanted people. You could even host your own image server and use steganography, then any casual passer by would just see an image but anyone with the decryption algorithm could decode the image and extract the embedded data. I don't see the logic of using spam.

Almost no one would get all the emails, so there would be nothing to find.

You'd need to have not just the encryption, but all the packets to reconstruct them before you applied the key.

Unless you were part of the backbone of the Internet, that receives and forwards all the information all you'd ever get is random bits and pieces that might not even be a part of a message until you had all the packets.

As to your reasoning - which I have certainly considered:


Let me put myself in the place of being a spammer/advertizer.

If I want to bypass your filters, or the automatic ISP filters that find spam for you....well then I probably would not use words that are surely on the obvious spam list.

But these emails don't avoid those words or those methods that are sure to get them noticed and filtered.

Now this could mean that advertizers are dumb.

Since advertizing is a multi-billion dollar industry, I think we can say that they aren't THAT dumb.

Could be that they are lazy and just going with a brute force method. Certainly possible.

Or it could be that a goodly amount of the time, it is preferable for you not to want to look at those emails. There is no real interest in having your attention at all.

I too have wondered about the true nature of these emails - many do not contain any links to products nor any type of obvious scam. The best I can come up with as an explanation is spamfilter 'deprogramming'. Most mail servers use spamfilters to block the spam in an early stage (before it even gets delivered). To keep up with the current spamming trend, most of those spamfilters employ some kind of learning technique, for example the Bayesian technique:

Bayesian filtering takes folders of known spam and known ham and identifies words or phrases ("tokens") that only show up in spam and tokens that only show up in ham. When a new message is being scored in the future, if it contains a lot of spammy tokens, it spam score goes up. If it contains a lot of hammy tokens, its spam score goes down. This is a much better approach than static phrase identification as it handles the case where "Nigeria" might be a legitimate word in an email to a travel agent's office, or "breast" would be legitimate in an email to a women's clinic.

(from www.stearns.org...)
The algorithm that decides how to learn from the input of mails (both spam and normal) may have some flaws or weaknesses that makes it exploitable. In the above filtering technique, an obvious problem arises when it first rates an email as either spam or ham, then learns the words in that very email as either 'spammy' or 'hammy' - it's circular.

Imagine the following - a spamfilter on a mailserver recognizes mail as either spam or valid mail. It's an elaborate guess made by matching for certain words (e.g. mortgage, diploma) but more importantly, being able to adapt to new words through rating the incoming content. Now let's say an attacker sends a lot of emails with normal words but the email headers don't match up (as they often do when the email is forged in a dirty way) - the spam filter will catch them and assign those normal words as 'spammy' tokens. If this attack works, then the spamfilter may start to block all valid emails as well! In effect, an administrator may have to lower the spamfilter's gate a little just in order to get the normal emails sent through .. and thereby the spam as well.

Most spamfilters employ too much techniques to be fooled so easily, luckily. It does however mean that some of these spammed emails may come through.


By the way, every now and then I do read those emails to see if they could have some other meaning.. Like the "Help, I'm being held prisoner in the factory" kind of messages you never know, right!

I am so cynical that if I saw that message I would wonder about their Nigerian scam.

reply to post by Aeons


Sorry, don't see it. t's a lot of bother just to send some information, and due to the nature of the medium you'd never be sure your completed message reached its destination mostly due to the process described by scraze. If you had access to a carrier network why would you need to use spam anyway? You'd be sending packets with massive levels of encryption over gbe switches with pretty much guaranteed privacy and security. Using spam is illogical. Hell you could even use a porn film on a p2p network if you wanted, authenticity being a simple SHA1 or MD5 checksum.

You would choose the above described method instead of the ones you've described, for the same reason you wouldn't just make a phone call.

And I'm sure that you could use those methods too. You can never have too many potential ways to convey information.

You are taking the concept of packets too literally with your check sum bit there.

You'd use the Internet's protocols to move information. But you can use the same concept of information deconstruction reconstruction and apply it to the individual parts of a message.

That message may be short.

Or that message may be very very large.

reply to post by Aeons


Sorry, the checksum would be for ensuring you had the correct file. Say you wanted to send a large amount of info, such a size that hiding in an image or as an email/attachment would be impractical, you would embed the data in a large file, say a movie, then host it via a filesharing network or something like usenet. The added data would not make the file appear unusually large and it would be hosted in such a way that it would be available from any location. Someone would then only need to email or txt you a string, that could be a SHA1, a torrent hash, a magnet link, then all you need to do is google search the string, download the matching file and decode the embedded data. The advantage of using a public network is the anonymity, it is literally hidden in plain sight, and could have originated anywhere.

Im sure most already new what it said but i made it easier to read.


"Eleven Years Ago,He'd Thought It Was Bad Enough That Serena Butler Had Usurped His Primary Position After All He Had Worked To Accomplish. Now The Whole Jihad Was About To Be Ruined By An Absurd Peace Proposal.It Could Never Work. How Could Keats And The Other Secondaries Have Failed So Utterly? Didn't They Understand What They Had Done?"

[edit on 07/16/2009 by Lichter daraus]

As a message, it seems totally possible that it might convey more meaning. Even without much hocus pocus.