Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by garbagetime 1296 days ago
I don't see the value in articles like these that don't even attempt to convince you what they are saying is true. Sure, I've heard this claim 1,000,000 times on sites such as Hacker News and Reddit - but I've yet to find any reason to believe it.

In the spam e-mail I get, the misspellings are clearly there to get around spam filters. In fact, the e-mails I get look quite convincing, and just have two or three strategic misspellings. A lot of the text will be in the form of an image, and will be spelled and formatted perfectly. But instead of saying "garbagetime" it will say "garbagetim". And instead of saying "18+" it will say "19+".

Looking at one spam e-mail I received recently, I see it even has an "unsubscribe" button, which leads to a vaguely convincing but - after some investigation - certainly non-functional unsubscribe page. That's a lot of effort to go to if you're trying to filter out vaguely clever people.

Maybe there really is a whole other genre of spam e-mail that simple doesn't get sent to me, or is caught by my spam filter. But this article gives me no reason to suspect this to be the case. And for various reasons it seems unlikely.