Spam e mails that start with dear?

Question

Do spammers really believe that we stop for one second for e mails that begin Dear or Dearest:

a. My Dearest one
b. My Dear Sir or Madam
c. Dear one
d. Dearest

Anyone else notice their improper English edicate by being familiar with someone by using intimate nouns? - I mean, it makes ones skin crawl.

Answer 1

Indeed. As well as their improper etiquette.

Answer 2

I found this piece on the net. A very interesting and the full verison of these articles. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624749
http://paulgraham.com/spam.html
(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc. An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering.)
I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. If we can write software that recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that.
_ _ _


To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, they would have little trouble doing it. How much do we have to do, short of AI, to automate this process?

I think we will be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. In fact, I've found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian filter, we now miss less than 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives.

The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam. You look at spams and you think, the gall of these guys to try sending me mail that begins "Dear Friend" or has a subject line that's all uppercase and ends in eight exclamation points. I can filter out that stuff with about one line of code.

And so you do, and in the beginning it works. A few simple rules will take a big bite out of your incoming spam. Merely looking for the word "click" will catch 79.7% of the emails in my spam corpus, with only 1.2% false positives.

I spent about six months writing software that looked for individual spam features before I tried the statistical approach. What I found was that recognizing that last few percent of spams got very hard, and that as I made the filters stricter I got more false positives.

Answer 3

I always laugh at the ones that start ( re: ) with no message after that, if they were real it would be followed by ( no subject ) idiot spammers. It is disgusting how they sit around and figure out ways to try and rip you off, or send you advertising you won't be interested in anyway.

Answer 4

Don't get em but my span goes into a special file which I don't have to open to read a synopsis. I just delete them babies!

In any case, us A-Mur-A-Kins abuse our bastardized version of English in a wholesale manner. Few adults are capable of saying (or asking) what they want to say.

The reader is forced to read between the lined for the meaning of what the writer/speaker is trying to say.

At best, this is dangerous.

Answer 5

No. I haven't been fortunate enough to be spammed by people so courteous. Anyway, I don't open anything unless I know where it's from.