Word salad is a term given to a spammer technique that is supposed to fool filters into not tagging a message as spam. The technique involves hiding or attaching a list of supposedly non-spammy words to spam messages.

Here's an actual example:

<font color=#edebf7>despatch bedder looses stiles acropolis</font>

The spammer tried to make those words appear in a very light gray so you wouldn't see them. We can only guess why he thought that including the term “acropolis” would do any good.

Word salad ranges from trivial examples like the one above, to attaching the complete text of news articles copied from the web.

If you want to find out why POPFile was never bothered by this “trick”, please read “ Why doesn't word salad work?”.