Zlati Meyer

Detroit Free Press

If misteaks lyke theez ann0y ewe, hEre's wyh.

Chances are, you're an introvert.

That's according to a new University of Michigan pole — just kidding, poll — that finds that your personality is what determines if e-mail errors, be they typos or grammar errors, drive you crazy.

The study used a fake ad for a housemate to see how 83 participants, all native English speakers, ranging in age from 18 to 60-plus and of varying educational levels would react to e-mail sender with keyboarding errors and grammar mistakes — and how those reactions correlate with various personality traits, including outgoingness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. Introverts rated the senders of the typo-strewn e-mails as less friendly, trustworthy and intelligent than, while extroverts weren't particularly perturbed. In addition, people with less agreeable personalities rated the e-mail sender who made grammatical errors lower.

The findings don't surprise me, though I'm using a test pool of one. I'm very extroverted but inverted letters, the misuse of there-they're-their, etc. doesn't bother me in e-mails. In fact, when e-mailing friends, I often make some myself and often don't bother to correct them in shorter messages, which I view as the written equivalent of a verbal conversation. Hell, a friend who's a neurologist once asked me if messages I'd sent were some sort of cognition test.

But the U-M study got me thinking about the sorts of e-mail most likely to contain typos and grammos — spam.

Robin Queen, chair of the university's linguistics department and a coauthor of the study, said there's something about introversion that makes people more likely to notice the mistakes and interpret them somehow. That could mean they're less likely to fall for spam offers.

"They were more bothered by the errors," she said, predicting, "If these people get spam with a bunch of errors in it, they’re less likely to fall for it. ... If I were a spammer and what I'm trying to do is get people to fall for my scam, I would probably want to be able to predict if a reader had a particular characteristic."

The professor isn't afraid that spammers will use her research to craft a better scam e-mail.

But why do so many of these filter-bound e-mails contain such easily-catchable errors? Are con artists so busy cooking up ways to get your money or personal data that they can't be bothered to use their spell-checkers?

I posed the question about why spam is so replete with errors to consumer protection expert Edgar Dworsky of consumerworld.org. In his e-mail reply, he explained that scam e-mails are often written by foreigners and that spam filters are often programmed to look for certain keywords, which if they find them automatically bump them to the junkmail folder. To get around that, spammer substitutes a similar looking letter in what would otherwise be a flagged word; for example "Viagra" becomes "V1AGRA."

But I didn't see that e-mail from Dworsky until he sent me a second one a minute later, telling about the first.

"The first e-mail I sent you had spammy words that I will not repeat here... and that proves my point that spam filters that see certain words automatically route them to the spam box... so clever scammers/spammers try to spell them differently!," he wrote.

Satnam Narang, senior security researcher at the software company Norton, said the typos and grammar mistakes might not be intentional if they're from swindlers in other countries for whom English isn't their first language. But in cases where the errors are premeditated, the writer is trying to sound like a foreigner, say, a Nigerian prince, or the scammer is using them to gauge potential victims.

"When these criminals are sending spam out, they’re sending in large bulk e-mail runs," he said. "Not everyone will open them, let alone respond. It’s a way to filter who’s gullible and will fall for it."

Contact Zlati Meyer: 313-223-4439 or zmeyer@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @ZlatiMeyer