Why do spammers spell out the street addresses in their emails?

Question

I've been getting a lot of spam/phishing emails recently and have noticed that spammers tend to use some tricks to get past the spam filters. For instance, pretty much all of them have some text that has been scraped from news articles and web forums inserted at the bottom of the email. I'm guessing that's b/c spam filters have an algorithm that use the ratio of flagged words and phrases to all the other words in the email in deciding if an email is spam or not. I've also noticed that they tend to spell out street addresses (ie Seven One Six two Two Juanita Drive Twentynine Palms CA). I was just curious why that was. Do spam filters look up street addresses and try to match them with domain names in order to try and figure out whether an email is spam/phishing or a legitimate business? Or is it something else?

Answer 1

You've supplied one possible explanation. Here's another. Think about this problem in terms of frequency/stochastic/Bayesian analysis. How many opportunities are there to vary a street address? Not too many.

Part of the way SPAM filters work are by counting the total number of instances of particular groups of letters, numbers, words, paragraphs, etc... If you send out 10K emails all with, '111 Main St' as opposed to 'One one one Main St'/'One 1 1 Main St'/'One 1 One Main St'/etc... then you have a far greater chance of being caught in automated filters. You just have more wiggle room, that's all.