Gibberish And Nonsense Emails
The Spam Infestation
Many Internet users receive an alarming amount of spam email on a very regular basis. A number of users report hundreds of unwanted and unrequested emails simply because they placed their email address somewhere online for the world (or at least a small portion of the virtual world) to see. This can make the email account itself unusable – after all, would you want to have to wade through hundreds of spam emails just to find a few genuine ones, and there is always a very real risk that you will miss some of the genuine ones in your over exuberance in deleting the rubbish spam.
Nonsense Subject Lines
It is certainly not uncommon to receive emails that contain nonsensical subject lines. These can appear in one of two ways. In some cases the subject will contain genuine English words strung together in such a way that they make absolutely no sense. The reason for these emails is very simple – they don't appear to a lot of spam filters as being spam. They are little more than an attempt to fool your anti spam techniques into allowing the emails to pass. Quite often this technique is accompanied by an email body that is just one image of the message.
Foreign Character Decoding
You might also receive emails that are filled with rectangles, sun symbols, and upside down characters. This is normally indicative of an email that was written in a foreign language that uses foreign characters. Email clients and email programs usually struggle with these characters unless you have installed the appropriate language pack. In all honesty, while it may be possible to copy these characters into a word processor and convert them into English, if you aren't expecting this kind of email it is most probably junk or spam email. In this case it really isn't worth bothering with.
Fighting Foreign Spam
Preventing these emails from getting through your spam filter can be difficult. Like the email application itself, most anti spam software is not designed to beat spam written in foreign characters. If the situation is fairly desperate and you are receiving a lot of this type of email then you may want to consider copying and pasting some relatively small chunks of the characters either into the blocked keyword list of your software or into a new email filter or rule. This may help to prevent some of these emails being delivered in the future but it is unlikely to completely eradicate the problem.
Summary
Spam is a major problem, even for some light Internet users. Leaving your email in the wild of the Internet means that automated spam software can spider the web, find your email address, and then repeatedly send spam to your Inbox. Preventing this can be difficult. One of the more difficult areas of spam to control is the use of nonsensical or seemingly illogical subject and email contents. These are usually either done intentionally in a bid to get round your anti spam software or the email was written using foreign language characters that could not be converted by your email application. In either case, and if you weren't expecting emails in these languages, then it is highly likely that these emails are spam and can be deleted.