OK, so I have gotten four or five spam emails of the follwing variety in the past week, and don’t recall ever getting them before.
The subject is always “Hi.” and the body is always a bad poem. A different bad poem. One example is as follows:
No links, no emails, no nothing. Just a bad poem. Another example is:
I think it’s just lorem ipsum to get it past the spam filters. I get the same thing all the time.
Lately, I’ve seen 'em put this stuff in the text body, then have a scanned JPEG or GIF as their ‘sales message’.
Tripler
Only pre-sig
past board filters
message to you
see what I mean?
It’s not Nigerians anymore, it’s Vogons! :eek:
Unfortunately, it’s working quite well at getting past the spam filters. My GMail is usually pretty good at weeding out most of the spam, but these things, from people such as Pleasance Goodhope slip right through.
Some of them are no worse than some of those weird artsy poems I’ve heard in coffeehouses, though. 
OK, so it’s desiged to get past a spam filter…but then what? As I said, there is NOTHING but a linkless poem. Are they just expecting me to reply to it asking what the hell, and then they know they have a valid email to send more spam to?
Is your email client set to display email as text-only or HTML? It might also contain a 1-pixel invisible graphic, which is downloaded from a website, called a “web bug” which lets the spammer know when you’ve opened it, and thus your email address is valid. Go ahead and forward an example of one of these emails to me, and I can tell you for sure.
I’m no expert in spam and anti-spam techniques, but there’s two possibilities I can think of.
They are sending something with a very low likelihood of being rejected in order to simply “test” e-mail addresses; if they get a bounce then they can throw out that address. I realize that not getting a bounce doesn’t imply that the e-mail address really is valid, but they can still say that all their e-mail addresses have been tested when they sell their address collection.
I wonder if some of these are an attempt to swamp trainable spam filters. If you designate enough random messages as spam, then it will be very difficult to keep both the false positive rate (non-spam mistakenly treated as spam) and the false negative rate (spam not recognized as spam) low.