# Strange spam. Extremely strange. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [January 5, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843 "2007-01-05T17:37:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![clayton\_e](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c57346/32.png) [@clayton\_e](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clayton_e)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843/1 "2007-01-05T17:37:00Z")
I just checked my e-mail and recieved [this](http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/4606/wtfky1.jpg) (screenshot) [for those of you that don’t want to open a new window it is an ad for prescription drugs, I think… With something of an incoherent rambling poem following it]. What… really, what is that? Even if it has nothing to do with prescription drugs (which I halfway suspect) what does it mean? Note: For some reason I had a fun time editing the image in paint… It wouldn’t fit on my screen so I merged two screenshots then fixed the borders. I also got rid of information in the address bar and the address of the sender. ---
**Author:** ![clayton\_e](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c57346/32.png) [@clayton\_e](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clayton_e)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2007, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843/2 "2007-01-05T17:38:55Z")
Oh, and should anyone ask, that is the last line of the “poem”, I didn’t cut it off while editing in what was there if I scrolled down. It ends abruptly. ---
**Author:** ![SmartAleq](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smartaleq/32/163_2.png) [@SmartAleq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmartAleq)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2007, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843/3 "2007-01-05T17:47:51Z")
We get those all the time at work–the “poem” is just random C&P junk inserted to fool the spam filters. The bit about prescription drugs is an image attachment, probably, and a lot of spam filters will segregate out items with attachments that come with dodgy “from” addresses which don’t also contain a certain amount of text. Sometimes they’re pretty bizarre in a found art kinda way, and we’ll take certain sentences and forward them around with the subject line “I-Ching according to Spam” if they’re sufficiently eye catching. Once I got one that appeared to be taken from the Phillip K Dick section of Amazon–once the C&P got done with it, though, it became vaguely pornographic… ---
**Author:** ![Velma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/85e7bf/32.png) [@Velma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velma)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2007, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843/4 "2007-01-05T18:33:46Z")
I have started getting those every day at work too! Within the last few weeks, and I never use my work account for anything other than in-house work stuff so I don’t know why it started. I don’t get them on my yahoo account, or else my spam filters are catching them. They are amusing though. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2007, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843/5 "2007-01-05T18:39:42Z")
You read spam? Huh. Why? ---
**Author:** ![clayton\_e](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c57346/32.png) [@clayton\_e](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clayton_e)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2007, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/strange-spam-extremely-strange/386843/6 "2007-01-05T18:50:05Z")
I saw the first couple lines in the example to the right of the sender’s name in my inbox and was curious.