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Do people usually just ignore these types of emails?
Yes, for the simple fact that half of the half trillion emails sent every day is spam mail. Trying to do something with them is a fool's errand. Just delete and make the most of your day.
162 billion spam emails are sent every day, with 49% of the 333 billion daily emails sent, considered spam (numbers recorded for 2022).(source)
Without getting too technical, it possible to write letters tbat look english but they are not. Tris technique is used to evade spam filters. Try copying the word directly from email subject and do search
Oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Actually, I just tried that for a bit. They're putting random zero-width spaces. So none of the words are actually full words.
There is a really well known homograph where they say https://www.аррӏе.com/ but the A in Apple is cyrillic not ASCII.
You’d think the server-side spam filters would be set up to catch that. Why mix two alphabets in a URL other than to do something slimy?
Because it all comes in as Unicode.
It's the server doing the meddling, don't forget that! Email servers have two things to base an analysis off of: the trustworthyness of the senders header data and the content.
Header analysis will quickly kill messages from the fake servers but only after a certain amount of spam is identified - the computer doesn't "read" the alphabet, it just sees valid encoded symbols. It's the humans job to find the traffic lights, so to say.
And content analysis is a cold war of attrition: building better filters leads to better tricks leads to better filters, etc.
The only way I have found to stay spam free is customizing my address for each potential sender (i.e. scipilemmy@mydomain.net).that was a lot of work to set up though...
Only whitelisted addresses go to my inbox, then I just check spam to see if there's anything I need to whitelist there (usually I'll know I need to check it if I've just given my email somewhere new) and empty it
What's you email provider? Do you use a program, or web app?