Gibberish Spam Domains?

[Shay]

Lately I had noticed that I was getting a bit more spam than I usually do. Normally I keep my spam levels down in gmail by creating filters to automatically send email to the trash from any address that has sent me spam. Sometimes I will block an entire domain if I get multiple spam emails from a domain that isn't common such as gmail, hotmail, aol, or yahoo. Most spam goes to the spam folder anyway but the filters help keep the amount of spam in the spam folder down which is helpful because I regularly check my spam folder to make sure nothing important ended up in there.

Anyway when I noticed the amount of spam in my spam folder starting to gradually increase from the norm I more closely examined the email addresses they were coming from. I saw that a good portion of them were gibberish email addresses, which isn't really that uncommon, but in addition to the screen name portion of the address being gibberish, the domain name was also gibberish as well. What I am seeing here would be something like "gibberish@gibberish.domainname.com", and the gibberish part of the domain name will often change but the non-gibberish part of the domain will often stay the same.

Gmail doesn't seem to have any functionality for filtering partial domain names so I really wasn't able to filter out this kind of spam using my normal filtering methods. Then I figured out that instead of creating a filter for email addresses/domains, I could just create a general filter to match specific words in an email and put in the non-gibberish part of the domain name in that filter. So far it seems to be working, but it will take some time to see what effect it actually has on stemming the increased flow of spam considering that a lot of spammers just use "junk email addresses" a couple of times and then move on to another email address. Apparently they are using "junk domains" as well now too.

I don't know if anyone else has been experiencing the type of spam I'm talking about(I doubt I'm the only one though), but I hope that my tips will prove helpful to some people. The suggestion I supplied only applies to gmail accounts, but I'm sure other email accounts will have similar filtering/blocking features.