Spam email- what on earth is this?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I received an email message with the normal nonsense about flogging something cheaper than shops. It started:

“It has come to my attention that you might have an interest in purchasing the operating system
Windows 7 Ultimate version SP1 & OFFICE 2010”

… Of course I am not interested in buying anything from them and was about to delete it except when I scrolled down, at the bottom of the page there was literally pages and pages of text starting with:

“I’m not crying for Angelina Jolie. Still, one downside to celebrity is that the individual gets pigeon-holed. Every time Angelina strays from what the public and the media expect, she takes a risk. Steal Jen’s man? OK. Get a new tattoo? All right. Adopt a kid? So Mia Farrow! But write, direct, and produce a serious movie? Wait a minute. Has she gone too far? Case in point: Angelina’s directorial debut, the R-rated “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” Here’s a serious-as-death drama. It’s in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, with English subtitles. It stars unknowns with unpronounceable names.”

There is miles more of it, but I just can’t see the connect. Why would anyone add that to spam?

2

Most likely because they believe it will fool spam filters into thinking that it is legitimate email.

3

Hashbuster. Trying to fool spam filters into not flagging it as spam.

4

What they said - the way it works is that many spam filters use Bayesian filtering, which is a way of correlating the incidence of particular groups of words, to try to categorise the content of messages - so the spammers include a bunch of random phrases that might appear in non-spam emails, so as to try to fool the filter into thinking it’s not spam.

5

Or, they thought you were really interested in Angie’s directing, and that interest might spur you to buy their absolutely legitimate and in no way fake software.

6

Or perhaps Alice beggared the white poppy, while Nimrod pranced the jolly mushroom, as the romantic miners imbibed confusion in a green yarmulke. Stacy polishes mud as the laughing coins ate fuzzy mules during the monstrous geode of Homer.

7

That was Angie’s first movie, a low-budget student film in which she played the “Third Fuzzy Mule” (uncredited).

8

The more “sophisticated” spammers will put the dummy text (which will have nothing to do with pirated software nor Viagra) in a white font so that it’s invisible on most screens.

9

Great name/post combo. :smiley:

Are you sure? The more sophisticated filters look for this.

10

This isn’t from hashbuster, though. It’s clearly a copy and paste from somewhere else. The logic is the same, but it’s assumed that real English will better fool the algorithms.

11

Thanks for the answers folks. I’m never too old to learn.