Random Selections from Everyday Spam
I normally and quickly delete my Spam box, but today I thought of checking it out to see what spammers were up to. To my surprise, I found the Spam almost inspiring; fulfilling some deep human need. Okay, not quite, but here are some nuggets from the Spam I’ve received today for your enjoyment.
Spammers are very poetic. Here is one that wreaks of confusion, but could be considered poetry:
Old enough and bright enough, maybe, to spill some kerosene around a cheap liquor bottle, then light a candle, and put the candle in the middle of the kerosene.
Here’s one from an alleged stock broker, pitching a stock:
WEXE is showing signs of making a huge leap in the coming days. It appears that a major announcement would catapolt the companies stoock to over 2.00 per share. This undervalued symmmbol is currently trading at approximately 0.55 and we predict that it will break 1.30 by next monday. We are recommending a buy and hold on this one – Call your stock broker now to get more information on WEXE.
Sounds pretty convincing to me.
Here’s more poetry, but this one wreaks of confusion, passion, and a sense of longing:
below; and this is so, because nothing is farther from the obtain. Yet when one of the two contraries is a constitutive or affection. To sketch my meaning roughly, examples of substance the two contraries, not one or the other, should be present in the no name assigned to them. In this, the inborn capacity is distinct same time both white and black. Nor is there anything which is modification, but because this modification occurs in the case of that is not a derivative. For instance, the upright man takes his the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present have to admit that such parts are not substances: for in explaining predicated of the lesser, so that all the differentiae of the disposed, we may say, either better or worse, towards knowledge.
Of course, your typical Spam products, but this one has a nice footer in the email:
Good day,
Viagra $1, 80
Cialis $3, 00
Levitra $3, 35Out of the way, Arthur, said a cold, curt voice.
It was Mr. Crouch. He and the other Ministry wizards were closing in on
them. Harry got to his feet to face them. Mr. Crouchs face was taut
Here are some really good deals on software — a Christmas sale, even:
Christmas discounts! Special New Year offers! OUR TOP 1O ITEMS!
$79 Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate
$79 MS Office Enterprise 2007
$79 Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro
$49 Windows XP Pro w/SP2
$99 Macromedia Studio 8
$59 Adobe Premiere 2.0
$59 Corel Grafix Suite X3
$59 Adobe Illustrator CS2
$129 Autodesk Autocad 2007
$149 Adobe Creative Suite 2
And, last but not least, some final words of wisdom, left to the reader to decipher the non-sensical:
For instance, a mountain is called small, a grain large, of which it is a half. Similarly the existence of a master Thus, man is predicated of the individual man; but animal is double and triple have no contrary, nor indeed has any such term.
Here’s a lesson-learned: before you habitually clean out your spam box, check it out once in a while. You’ll never know what you’ll find. If nothing else, you’ll get a laugh out of what you find there.
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Comments
This is HOW they do it….
Take a large body of text (e.g. War and Peace).
Take a sample of the frequency of each word in the text (so “and” crops up more often than “retrospectively”). Now you just choose random words based on the WEIGHTING of each word.
OK, so now you have lots of “a”, “is”, “and”, “the” etc… but how do you make sentences.
Well… if you take a sample of each “pair” of consecutive words (or a chain of three or four words), you are more likely to choose a meaningful word that follows the last word in your made up sentence. The result… meaningless but convincingly meaningful grammar!
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I have a feeling that this is rhetorical, but spam folks are pulling phrases out of public domain works in order to get past spam filters, right? By putting a different set of actual phrases in the body it seems that it would be really really hard for automated systems to detect spam. I think that last nonsensical one is a collection of Aristotle phrases, btw.
So how does this work, exactly. Does each email get a different set of phrases lifted from places like Project Gutenberg and a different spoofed “from” address?
-JD