A newer and very popular tactic with “Viagra and Cialis” spammers is to move part of their sales pitch out of the email “Subject” and into the “From” address instead.
This technique takes advantage of the fact that email standards allow for the
“From” address to include both an actual email address <user@domain.com> and also what’s commonly referred to as a “Pretty Address” where the sender can include any name or title they choose.
Taking advantage of the “Pretty Address” is exactly what spammers are doing in volume, with “From” addresses like:
- “VIAGRA Official Site” <stephencahill@gmail.com>
- “Viagra Sample” <tubeXL@voanews.com>
- “Free Viagra & Cialis” <coulddO@flibus.com>
- “Free Viagra Sample” <shieldsYE@tehrantimes.com>
- “Viagra Promo” <pompadour0H@flibus.com>
- “Try Viagra for Free” <yeasp@archive.org>
- “GetFree Viagra” <parkeNM@911tabs.com>
- “Viagra&Cialis Sample” <twajo@yahoo.com>
- “Free ViagraAndCialis” <armholef3@ciponline.org>
As simple as it is, this tactic offers several advantages to the modern spammer.
First of all, this allows the spammer to take the words and phrases most likely to trigger spam filters and move them out of the “Subject” (where most filters look) and into the “From” line instead. Since many filtering applications don’t aggressively or accurately measure the “Pretty From” contents, this alone helps increase the spammer’s delivery rates.
By extension, this also then allows for “Subject” lines (which are commonly filtered aggressively) to be made much more innocuous, while still maintaining an effective marketing pitch. Notice in the example below that the spammer can make the product pitch quite clear but without actually using words that would be likely to trigger most spam filters:
- Never let her down again
- Pay shipping and get your trials
- Chase away your bedroom blues
- The magical blue pills will do it
- We give your money back
- Learn more about our free trial here
- Be ready for action 24/7
While these phrases might not be specific enough to have the desired marketing impact on their own, when combined with the “Viagra and Cialis” references in the “From” address they make perfect marketing sense.
Finally, even when spam filters do accurately remove these emails, when any user reviews their spam report, quarantined mail or Junk folder, these emails still very effectively stand out; giving the targeted consumer one last opportunity to open and view the spammers offering.
A typical and reasonable reader might easily underestimate the significance of this last point, but remember that the spammer is only targeting a very small minority of email users. Specifically, those who are willing to:
- Buy such products from spammers in the first place
- Order from off-shore web sites
- Purchase medications shipped from foreign countries
- Actually consume the product when it arrives
So, while the average person might not fish such spam emails out of their filtering system, the user who’s willing to take such risks certainly isn’t going to be above retrieving these emails based on the suggestive if slightly obfuscated “From” and “Subject” lines.
Just for added measure, many of these emails use works like “official” and include the Registered Trademark symbols, presumably to reassure the most gullible of readers that they really are genuine medications, and not just gypsum power formed into pill shapes and appropriately colored to match.
While the spammers sales rates must be quite low, they are definitely compensating with volume. Currently these emails account for a whopping 15.03 percent off all spam blocked by OnlyMyEmail.com filtering systems.
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OnlyMyEmail is an award winning hosted spam filtering service and business email hosting provider. Our enterprise cloud computing anti-spam solution, the MX-Defender, has the highest capture rate of any spam filter ever tested in the VBSpam Challenge, blocking a record setting 99.9993% of all malicious and junk email.
Our Personal spam filtering system is also a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and has won both the PC World "World Class Award" and also the PC Magazine "Editor's Choice Award."
OME-Kids is a webmail solution that protects children from spam and other harmful emails. OME-Kids offers unique Parental Controls that allow you to choose the level of security and oversight that's right for your child.
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I like this article. I wish I could get free viagra for real, but its only a scam.