Spammers Discover Internationalization

Got this in my inbox this morning with a Spam Assassin score of 0.1: “If yöu Ã¥sk yöursëlf “Höw cÃ¥n it bë sö chëåp?”, thë Ã¥nswër is simplë: wë buy hugë quÃ¥ntitiës dirëctly fröm thë möst fÃ¥möust PhÃ¥rmÃ¥cy Pröducërs (whërë pëöplë cÃ¥nnöt buy) thÃ¥n wë chÃ¥rgë just önë cënt për dösë. This wÃ¥y yöu gët thë bëst pricës Ã¥ll övër thë wörld Ã¥nd wë sëll much mörë thÃ¥n öur cömpëtitörs.” I wonder how long it’ll take my bayesian filters to learn this trick. And no, they weren’t using CSS or a punk band.

4 thoughts on “Spammers Discover Internationalization

  1. It’d be good if you could have all characters that look like a certain character be converted to that character prior to application of the filters. “Ã¥” should become “a” and so forth. Seems silly to have to wait for the bayesian filters to catch up.

  2. We non-anglophones have had to deal with this problem for some time. I get a huge amount of English spam for a small amount of English legit email, and a small amount of French/Spanish/German/Japanese … spam for a bigger number of legit emails in German and French (but not in other languages). Spamassassin deals with it alright, once I’ve trained it with the first samples of a new batch. But ultimately, Bayesian filtering is bound to be a problem, see this post by Edward W. Felten.

  3. Heh… I find that hilarious. Who the hell writes all those nasty thingies above their letters? Haha! Silly people! :op

    Reminds me of some MP…

    M0nti Pyth0n ik den H0lie Gralen

    Wi n0t trei a h0liday in Sweden thi yer?

    A M00se once bit my sister…

    No realli! She was Karving her initals on the m00se
    with the sharpened end of an interspace t00thbrush given
    by Svenge – her brother-in-law – an Oslo dentist and
    star of many Norwegian m0vies: “The H0t Hands of an Oslo
    Dentist”, “Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge M0lars of Horst Nordfink”.

    Just entered my mind… I’m sorry. I’m just that way.

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