# Please don't read this, again about penis patch, sorry.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-dont-read-this-again-about-penis-patch-sorry/301427>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [April 27, 2005, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-dont-read-this-again-about-penis-patch-sorry/301427 "2005-04-27T20:07:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bouv](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bc8723/32.png) [@bouv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bouv)\
**Post date:** [April 27, 2005, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-dont-read-this-again-about-penis-patch-sorry/301427/1 "2005-04-27T20:07:51Z")

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That was the subject line of a piece of spam I got. Hey, if I have to deal with spammers, at least I have honest, apologetic spammers. 😃 Whoever wrote it even apologized two or three timse in the email body itself (because of the subject line, I felt a need to open it…don’t worry, I use a web mail browser so nothing bad got onto my PC.)

I also got another piece with the following as the messaeg body:

> [@](#):
>
> Still avoid contact with her from computer?, make love to her boobs? with don.  
> Most after believe that tissue caricature box

Well…the first two sentances _kinda_ make sense, but what the Hell is up with that last one? Tissue caricature box? Well…I don’t usually say this, but…BAND NAME!

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**Author:** ![Pullet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Pullet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pullet)\
**Post date:** [April 27, 2005, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-dont-read-this-again-about-penis-patch-sorry/301427/2 "2005-04-27T20:31:58Z")

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Dude, I don’t understand your OP.

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**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\
**Post date:** [April 27, 2005, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-dont-read-this-again-about-penis-patch-sorry/301427/3 "2005-04-27T22:01:15Z")

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Your penis needs patching? I’m very sorry to hear that.

As for the goofball bit about tissue caricature, that’s how the spam avoids being clobbered by Bayesian filters - they look for prevalence of words like “viagra” and “refinance” in proportion to other words.

More about Bayesian filters [here.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_filtering)

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**Author:** ![bouv](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bc8723/32.png) [@bouv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bouv)\
**Post date:** [April 27, 2005, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-dont-read-this-again-about-penis-patch-sorry/301427/4 "2005-04-27T22:56:56Z")

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So basically the more “normal” words that appear relative to “spam” words (like viagra, porn, penis, etc…) the less likely it will be marked as spam? So, in theory, a piece of spam could say:

“Come get your free porn penis viagra enlarger!”

And as long as it then was followed by a stream of 1000 normal words it might be marked as good email? Weird. I thought most filters just looked for one instance of a “spam” word and that was it. I know I’ve had plenty of good emails get marked as such jsut because of a casual reference to a “spam” word.