I received a spam email today that had some strange text in it. After the usual “I’m a single girl looking for love” blah, blah, blah, with a link to go to, and a link to “cancel” messages (right…), there was this block of text:
A quick google search reveals that these are quotes from, respectively, War of The Worlds by H.G. Wells, The 30,000 Bequest by Mark Twain, Alcibiades I by Plato, (two titles), Charmides, or Temperance by Plato, and The Apology of Socrates by Plato. Besides letting me know that I'm dealing with an extremely well-read %@! spammer, why put that text in a spam message?
All quotes, by the way, are available from free e-books online, which is no doubt where the %#$! spammer got them. But for what purpose?
Have seen them also be concealed within “hidden” html source code in spam-mails. They are likeliest to be spoofer text, to confuse the filters, with another possibility being as tracers or markers to track the diffusion of that particular e-mail.
I had one nested inside a Dickens passage. The original text color had been changed so as to render it nearly invisible.
The troubling thing is, at least some business must be generated by these e-mails else they wouldn’t exist. How the hell did humans ever get…to…the…moon…
Bayesian spam filters apply a statistical method to determine the likelyhood that a message is spam. The inclusion of unrelated quotes might be the difference between being filtered as probably spam and being let through as possibly isn’t spam.
(Simple filtering rules are, of course, the reason the message is titled “M.A.K.E. M.O.N.E.Y. F.A.S.T”)
