Being a programmer myself, I can appreciate the challenges in designing an AI that will correctly filter these messages. But to date, every spam message I have seen contains these nonsense character strings in the message body, that clearly do not abide by either the relative frequency of letters nor the allowed combinations of letter pairs in English or any other language. They should be easy to filter out without the need for a dictionary lookup.
Usram, in theory it is possible to distinguish order numbers or part numbers from spam gibberish. (Humans do it. ) With or without random words, there is always this gibberish, no? Are you saying that some of the newest spams do not contain any gibberish at all?
That’s what I’m saying. Ironically, looking through my spam folder the only words that are misspelt in these e-mails are the ones that are part of their actual message (“V1g@ra” and so on). Of course, adaptive spam filters already deal with such obfuscation effectively.
Cityboy916, some spams contain gibberish. Some contain random words. Some use other techniques, all with the intended purpose of getting past the filters, the first generation of which only checked for key words or the number of exclamation marks in a row (I’ve learned not to send email to my friends with double !'s as they often get trapped by the simpliest filters.)
So some get thru. Spam filters improve, the spammers try something else. They more tries, the more likely success. It’s a scattershot approach and one which lends itself well to a server spewing emails at max speed 24/7.
As for writing a filter that can distinguish between legitimate part numbers and real gibberish, as a programmer yourself, you must know this is more of an art than a science. And even if you were 99.99% successful, don’t you think the spammers would try to emulate real orders, invoices and part numbers? Then the number of false positives would likely increase – this is the flip side of the problem.
Oh, I forgot. Some people don’t `get’ jokes, do they? I shall endeavor to keep my posts entirely free of humor, lest I offend someone for whom the very idea of sarcasm is repugnant, and for whom irony is what one obtains from an irony ore mine.
Spam imitators never seem to fare well. I remember seeing “Spork” (“Spiced pork”, natch) and “Prem” ("Pressed meat. Mmmmm) but they never achieved market saturation. I guess imitation Spam is too depressing a concept. No matter what you call it, it’s still going to taste like defeat.
Hey, maybe we should have a less-gelatinous Spam for health-conscious types. “DEFatted mEAT.” Brainstorm!
OK, I keep forgetting the many people on here who attempt to commit sarcasm when they wouldn’t be capable of it if you primed them with the collected works of Mark Twain and and MST3K marathon. My bad.
This is first thread that I’ve ever seen in which a discussion of the scourge of e-mail spam actually veered off into a argument over the merits of the pink meaty variety of SPAM…
You guys make me miss my 5 inch drive, and all my Infocom games. I had Beyond Zork, one about scuba diving and salvage, Infidel, and a couple others. That was the same time I was playing Bard’s Tale and a very early Indiana Jones game, I think it was Last Crusade. It was an early entry in the great field of “trial and error gaming”.
Man, I jumped on the nerd train EARLY! I only turned 19 two days ago!
You are standing in an unfamiliar thread.
Above you, there is a complaint about unsolicitated mail that has degenerated into a catfight about mechanically separated meat products.
To your right, there is a “Forum Jump” drop-down dialogue.
Hmm, I just found an interesting feature of IE. If you are scrolling through messages with your mouse over the scroll bar, and the left mouse button is down, and you read a message that makes you laugh so hard that you start shaking, the thread starts scrolling up and down in a really weird way.
) With or without random words, there is always this gibberish, no? Are you saying that some of the newest spams do not contain any gibberish at all? 
