Submissions and spam

4 Comments

After a couple of weeks of barely-higher-than-normal submission volume, we're back to nearly double normal volume again this week. It probably won't be another hundred-submission week, but I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up with eighty or ninety this week.

(For those who missed my clarification of my recent entry about submission volume: we've had about 300 submissions so far this month, not 7000. Apologies for my confusing phrasing.)

Unrelatedly, I just received a clever spam that puts the scrambled-word effect into practice (links removed, of course):

STILL NO LUCK ENRGAILNG IT?

Our 2 pcodruts will work for you!

1. #1 Suplpeemnt avialbale! - Works!

ETNER HERE

and

2. *New* Enhancement Oil - Get hrad in 60 scneods! Amzaing! Lkie no ohter oil you've seen.

ENETR HERE

the 2 pdruocts work gerat totgeher

FOR WMOEN ONLY: TOCUH HERE

It seems like a clever way to get around spam filters; the ironic thing is that my spam filter caught this and tagged it as spam.

4 Responses to “Submissions and spam”

  1. JeremyT

    My understanding of bayesian filtering, which is weak at best, is that it won’t matter if they scramble the letters– words earn scoring based on the combination of the letters– which is why my spamassassin is still able to identify something like V93ia83gr8a as a spammer word.

    Maybe that’s not really bayesian though, but just part of how spamassassin scores spam.

    reply

  2. Jed

    Interesting; didn’t know that. Thanks!

    …I also didn’t know that this scrambling has apparenly become a very common technique recently; in the past half-hour, checking through recent spam quickly for false positives, I’ve found a dozen messages that use scrambled words. So maybe this is old hat. But I hadn’t noticed it before.

    reply

  3. Greg Beatty

    Jed, as far as submissions, I’m not surprised you’re getting that many, really. You bumped SH’s pay rate up into the new SFWA pro rates, you accept electronic submissions, and you work on keeping response times low.

    Still, I don’t envy you.

    Greg

    reply

  4. David Moles

    Also, by not actually saying anything meaningful, the spammer avoids any possible prosecution under false advertising laws. How are you supposed to prove you didn’t get hrad in 60 scneods when you don’t know what “hrad” means, or what a “scneod” is?

    When the spammers really get sophisticated, you’ll start getting email like that with “FICTION SUB” in the subject line.

    reply

Join the Conversation