Explain this surreal series of spam.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My Hotmail manages to block 95% of the spam that is sent to me. However, it also manages to block about 10% of actual email or notification messages, so I periodically check my “Junk Mail” folder. Lately I’ve noticed a series of spam with bizarre titles, so I reluctantly clicked a few. They each contain an image that Hotmail has graciously blocked for me, that links to a URL that I have wisely declined to visit, plus random strings of text. Here are a few:
**From: Lincoln Petty <xalyirjzjud@front.ru>
Subject: churchillian is rostrum

**And bounce the dark side of her hole puncher.Still borrow money from her from hydrogen atom defined by, plan an escape from her lover around anomaly with hockey player behind.burglar seek around bowling ball.Now and then, pork chop around a change of heart about gypsy over alchemist.Still reach an understanding with her from salad dressing related to, boogie her toward cloud formation with mating ritual living with industrial complex.A few cowards, and beyond fetishist) to arrive at a state of toothpick
ekstrom inelegant expand palate hamper spotty billings reminiscent

**From: Owen Frederick <wxlmnbg@pobox.sk>
Subject : tabloid 1019 clocks
**

inside girl scout is fat.But they need to remember how seldom bottle of beer toward garbage can beams with joy.Most haunches believe that living with curse satiate mirror beyond.When carpet tack near hesitates, defined by corporation hides.And befriend the dark side of her jersey cow.trombones remain frustrating.
transcription corrosion mortgage resurrect acre extraterrestrial
From : Beverley Howard <wtagwgegtpdzp@poczta.onet.pl>
Subject : steam engine bubble baths about 436

Simon and I took hockey player related to hockey player (with living with onlooker, ocean over.Sometimes minivan about toothache prays, but globule living with always fall in love with tape recorder toward swamp!If beyond waif caricature roller coaster inside, then shadow inside trombone gets stinking drunk.When judge from is crispy, cheese wheel for microscope compete with toward gonad.trombone inside pork chop self-flagellates, and related to graduated cylinder sweeps the floor; however, fruit cake around warranty caricature…dolphin about bride, warranty inside girl, and about deficit are what made America great!
silk agreeable invective wappinger coriander complementary

And so on, and so forth. Can anyone tell me what the point of the randomly generated schizophrenic text is? They’re an entertaining read, but they worry me. Is this an attempt to fool spam filters into thinking it’s a real message (if this is the case, it was obviously ineffective)? Is it simply to lure me into opening the email with a strange title? Or is it something more sinister? Are they designed to control my mind? Is Dali communicating with me from beyond?
All of the above?

2

Hey, at least yours is in English. I get mine in German for some reason.

And, yes, I’m pretty sure it’s an attempt to evade spam filters. In fact, they’re probably just test emails fired off to see which accounts bounce or accept it.

3

How very true :frowning:

4

Has anyone taken all the spam of this sort they get and turned it into a book yet? I wouldn’t expect more than one publishing run and modest sales, but the beauty is that all the spammers would have already done all the work for you. All you have to do is arrange it by approximate subject and surrealness, then go to a publisher.

Or, just do some actual work and use it to create poetry.

5

That spammer is performing a public service. He discovered the manuscript of James Joyce’s lost novel in his attic and is sharing excerpts from it with the world!

6

Cool, I checked mine and I’m getting the same crap!

If I were trying to get around filters I would not include words like ‘cleavage’.

7

How about setting it up as a play, in a vein similar to the plays based verbatim on political speeches, pilot-pilot discussions, etc. that are gaining in popularity?

8

Specifically, I think they are trying to fool Bayesian filtlers. My Bayesian filters still manages to catch most spam, though! And very few false positives.
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
I highly recommend it.

9

The ones that bug me at the moment are the ones that say “What about my order!” I haven’t opened them yet because they aren’t going to make me look, the dirty crooks. It sounds as if they’re trying to scare me into seeing what they want. What order? I don’t remember any steenkin’ order! Sheesh!

Oh, thank heaven for Spamblocker!

10

Hello all,
I work at a company that sells (among other things) spamfilter software. I believe the posters who suggested that this is a way to help the mail avoid spamfilters are correct. IIRC The strange mumbo jumbo text is actually there just to make the email seem fuller. Some spamfilters will catch email that just has a single link to an image like that since normal email just doesnt usually look that way. The text is just randomly generated dictionary words designed to add fluff and act as filler to fool the filter. Perhaps clevage gets in there because of the way the random words are generated.

Or maybe the person sending the mail is an insane lunatic struggling to make himself understood so he can share his porn collection with you.
:slight_smile:

11

What’s the point of it, though? Just to have something to couch the link most sane, above room temp IQ’d people would never click on?

The thing that scares me, is that it resembles part of one of my fan fics. The difference is that if you look at this

It does say something…as long as you only read the first letter of each word. I tried some of the spam. They’re even more secret code than mine :stuck_out_tongue:

12

I’m getting some of those too.

Never thought about clicking on the weird titles before, but since yours were so odd I figured I’d have a look.

The best line I found: “And derive perverse satisfaction from the dark side of her cheese wheel.”

:eek:
I’m finding that a few words pop up repeatedly. hockey player, clodhopper, tornado, cream puffs, tabloid…

Are they randomly generated, or is there a drunk guy with a limited imagination sitting at a keyboard somewhere thinking these up?

13

I get a lot of these, but the ones in the OP make more sense than mine usually do. It looks like they made some attempt (whether human-powered or a computer-powered, I don’t know) to make them at least grammatically correct. Very interesting and poetic.

14

I have actually done this. All I added was punctionation and line breaks.

15

Maybe they’ve been run though an online translator a couple of times!

There could be great knowledge within!

16

Why don’ t they just use Lorem Ipsum?

17

:eek: :cool:

18

Ooh, here’s a new one that I especially like. Best parts in bold:

19

Well, I didn’t say it said something nice… :smiley:

20

I think I need a Babelfish.

Here is my contribution, which I started a thread with and have asked the mods to remove because it really should be here. What can I say? I was suffering from the LSD-like aftereffects of reading the darn thing.

living with taxidermist earns frequent flier miles, and dilettante about fighter pilot takes a coffee break; however, bonbon for hydrogen atom tr to seduce…defined by ruffian recognize living with support group.cargo bay related to compete with cowboy toward minivan, or over midwife dance with sheriff over mortician.Sometimes about tripod self-flagellates, but from turn signal always throw at warranty behind!
crowd calgary sousa fresh xi punic sculpt
Any submarine can pour freezing cold water on near particle accelerator, but it takes a real garbage can to behind paper napkin.
decide quaff apostate wronskian