I don't know what to tell you. It still works. Personally, I get about 30 job applicants a day, about 2 of which are from real people, which are consistently filtered into my inbox by the subject line keyword I state clearly in the online job description. The spam content is ever improving in terms of relevance. But it's success rate of beating this filter hasn't changed at all.

AI bots are designed to pray and spray, essentially. Customizing the message doesn't change the fact. They're not designed to scan a job spec or article, look for a secret keyword and insert it into the subject line. They could do that, of course, but they don't. Not in March 2026, at least.

If the author wanted to only receive emails from real people, I would bet a lot of money that this trick would be very effective. Whether those real humans are also on the scam is a different question, but they would be humans who had taken the time to read the blog, that's for sure. which, based on the evidence presented, are not the problem.

So yeah, I don't really care if you ignore me or believe me or not, but if anyone is suffering from a similar problem, a simple request to insert a secret into the subject is very effective at proving you are human. I'd recommend giving it a try.

anyway, got to go read a book!