So I get a lot of spam. Not unusual, as I have had the same primary email for something like 14 years. My email provider filters a lot, and Thunderbird is fairly good at getting rid of the rest. But some slips through, especially the stuff that’s rigged to defeat Bayesian filtering.
I get the usual selection of stuff offering hot stock tips and h0t ru5514n nud35 and the like. I see it in passing as I teach Thunderbird to ignore it, but today I got one that’s a little unusual.
I think it’s from one of three possible sources:
Somebody completely, utterly batshit crazy.
The Internet itself, somehow become sentient and trying to communicate.
Aliens.
The entire body of the email is as follows:
Anyone have other theories, or other evidence in support of mine?
I get about a hundred spam emails a day on my Gmail account (which traps them all - I’ve never had a miscategorisation, and I’ve got 900MB of legit stuff. I’ve used this address in some very dubious places hence the spam), and it all currently seems to be mail from the ghost of William Burroughs in one of his more drug-fuelled cut-up periods.
So far I haven’t had a single piece of spam get past my Bayesian filter. I’ve trained it pretty dilligently for close to the past year so it’s pretty capable of distinguishing between spam and eBay notices and such.
That said, the spam there is just another attempt at defeating filters like this. The spam just grabs random sentences or fragments from a big text file of random sentences or fragments and turns them into an E-Mail. Nothing new or surprising there.
The spam program itself, however, may have been programmed by aliens. Aliens who want to sell you v1agra.
My first thought was that it was indeed just an attempt to defeat Bayesian filtering, until I noticed that it wasn’t trying to sell anything. The only call to action I see is this one…
The e-mail tests to see which of the phrases will trip the filtering software.
They start with big messages, using many phrases. Then, they narrow the number of phrases, sending additional messages until the pharses that don’t work are isolated. They then tweak the way each rejected phrase is worded, until they get past the filter.
I would bet there’s some sort of hidden one-pixel image in there someplace that tells the host when the recipient has opened the email. The rest of the text is just to get past the filter.
I believe I read about a year ago that spam emails like this “alien” are actually just computer generated, random messages sent to find email addresses (when you click, they know they have a real email address).
Thus, when you click you have just verified the validity and given your email address to someone to sell for further spam.
I don’t open them, but I do have Thunderbird set to preview them, so I see the contents. As I mentioned above, Thunderbird blocks attached images, so there’s no communication back to HQ going on, and thus no danger of me giving away that they have a live email address.
