Googlewhack trick used to slip junk mail past spam filters

Spammers feel lucky

Advanced features in Google's search engine are being used by spammers to disguise the URLs of spamvertised sites. Hackers have been using Google search functions to hunt for vulnerabilities. Now their peers in the junk mail business are getting into the act, Symantec reports.

Google supports a variety of advanced query words that are capable of narrowing the scope of a search. Spammers have latched onto this functionality as a means to direct an end user to a URL advertising their products or services, without directly pointing at a site. The approach, as with so many in the field of spamming, is designed to bypass junk mail filters.

Symantec came across the technique after coming across spam emails containing a URL that, on casual inspection, resembled a "Google search results" link. However, when clicked, the URL directs surfers to a site selling replicas of expensive watches, pens, and jewelry.The trick worked because a spammer had managed to make a search query that was specific to their website, using an advanced Google search combining the "inurl" and "intext" operators. Next comes the clever part: spammers simulate a user click on Google's seldom-used "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, so that surfers are taken directly to the first result that comes up for the entered search query. As the spammer has designed the query to yield only one result - that of the spamvertised site - surfers are taken directly to a junk-mail-promoted site after selecting what looks like a search result entry.Having designed the trick, it's straightforward for spammers to pump out emails designed to evade junk mail filters. Fortunately anti-spam firms are able to counter the approach, which represents another skirmish in the ongoing war of the inboxes between those developing junk mails and filters. "As usual, spammers keep changing their techniques to defeat the filters," explains Symantec researcher Jitender Sarda. "But on the other hand, we develop new techniques and technology to counter them." ®

How to Extract Email Addresses from your Gmail Folders

Learn how to extract unique email addresses from your Gmail mailbox and export them as CSV files with the help of a simple Google Script.

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I have written a little utility – The Sender’s List – that will help you extract email addresses from your Gmail account. You may extract addresses from every single message in your Gmail mailbox or it can sift through emails that are tagged with a particular label (or folder).
The extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that you may either download as a CSV file or you can use that raw list as an input for Mail Merge. If you looking to create an email marketing campaign for your clients who are not in your Google Contacts but have previously communicated with you, The Sender’s List could be a time-saving option.

To get started, click here to create a copy of the Google Script. Next, put the name of your Gmail folder in cell A2. You may use Inbox for extracting address from mails that are in your Inbox, Starred for just the important emails or All for processing all messages.
Internally, the script pulls email addresses of senders from messages tagged with a particular label and exports them to a Google Sheet. Since the script needs to track messages that have been processed, it applies a new label to these messages and the default name of this label is Processed. If you wish to use a different name, just replace the value of cell B2.
Now choose the Gmail menu in the Google sheet (see screenshot) and select Initialize. Grant the script access to your Gmail mailbox and then choose RunProgram from the same Gmail menu.
The Google script is now running in the background and, depending on the size of your Gmail folder, may take some time to complete. You may close the Google sheet and it will send you an email once the extraction is complete. The duplicate email addresses will automatically be removed from the final list.
If you wish to extract addresses from another Gmail label, just create a new copy of the blank sheet and repeat the steps. Also, you may choose Gmail->Uninstall to stop the background script from running.