Can’t See the Real Mail for the Spam…

Recently, AOL released a list of its most frequently-seen spam subject lines. While I might not get 556 billion spam messages a year, but my spam is up also (1478 last year, this year: 3351).

So I did my own little investigation on what words appear most frequently in spam email subject lines. A quick grep from the subject lines of my junk folder (in maildir format) and a run through a tokenizer and uniq revealed the following list:

    304 re
    260 you
    239 your
    212 for
    209 a
    182 the
    154 iso
    151 free
    147 is
    144 to
    134 new
    131 confirmation
    114 or
    113 of
    112 st
    109 th
    106 update
    106 this
    104 card
    104 b
     99 rernst
     99 gift
     86 in
     84 q
     84 customer
     83 january
     81 fw
     76 ck
     76 and
     74 stock
     74 get
     74 c
     72 on
     68 shares
     67 r
     63 starbucks
     61 pain
     61 do
     60 at
     54 walmart
     54 here
     52 software
     49 prescripiton

I didn't bother stripping out the two and three character words. Down the list are many many common misspellings of words - these are probably from spammers' attempts to get through spam filters. For interest's sake, the complete list is available here.

I find it interesting that my username 'rernst' appears in quite a few subject lines: very few humans or even automated mail would feature this.... I don't recall seeing it frequently.