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Ask HN: What's this email about?

2 points by jonp ↗ HN
I just got sent this. I'm guessing it's spam of some sort. But what purpose does it serve for them to send it?

from: aisiku9200@rr.com subject: village strands Widely few

British he Mifflin

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 16.9 ms ] thread
dotBen
a) to see if it bounces (if it doesn't then they can sell it as a valid email address)

b) to test anti-spam trigger words by seeing if you receive it or if it bounces due to spam.

rcfox
c) To confuse adaptive spam filters to either allow spam through, or cause it to flag legitimate email.
aphyr
This is an attempt to poison your spam filter. By forcing the filter to discriminate between good emails with English text and innocuous words, vs spam emails with English text and slightly different innocuous words, the filter can't discriminate as accurately and may misidentify good emails as spam. In order to combat this we (sometimes implicitly) change the threshold required to flag an email as spam, and allow more spam email through.

(My guess is this doesn't belong on HN, though.)