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ThreatBody content

Invisible control characters in From header — zero-width joiner / RTL override attack

invisible-chars-in-from

What this tier means

High-confidence threat indicator — phishing, impersonation, BEC, or scam pattern. Strong contributor to the trash decision.

How Gorganizer detects this

From header contains invisible / control Unicode characters — zero-width joiner (U+200D), zero-width space (U+200B), right-to-left override (U+202E), word joiner (U+2060), byte-order mark (U+FEFF), etc. Attackers insert these to visually mask the true domain ("security@paypal\u200B.evil.com" displays as "security@paypal.evil.com" but the parser sees the ZWSP), to reverse displayed text with RTL overrides, or to bypass substring-match whitelists. Legitimate email addresses never contain these characters.

False-positive guard

Every signal in Gorganizer feeds a multi-module score — never a sole verdict. This is a threat-tier signal — it adds a strong contribution to the trash score. The full pipeline still requires convergence across multiple modules + a margin over the safety floor before deletion happens, and Gmail's trash (30-day recovery) is always used — never permanent delete.

About the scoring engine

Gorganizer's scoring engine emits over 1,800 signals across six modules — headers, sender, subject, body, attachments, and structural metadata. Every email is scored by every module independently; the final verdict requires multiple modules to agree and the trash score to beat the safety floor by a margin.

Sacred safety guards — never delete starred emails, replies, calendar invites, receipts/invoices, or attachments — apply unconditionally regardless of any signal.

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