OK, for a while now I’ve been receiving all kinds of weird spam mail. Though annoying, I do understand the value of spam. These however, are mystical to me. For example:
WTF?? Nothing is being sold, no russian women are offered, from what I can tell I can’t add length to my penis through this.
What the hell is the use for this spam? Are aliens trying to communicate with me? Am I relaying some sort of secret code messages from Osama to Saddam? I almost went and opened the URL, but I’m more sensible than that. Still, curiosity is getting the better of me…
Maybe they’re trying to get you to wonder “WTF is this?” and then open it, as you were tempted to do. After opening the link, THEN the ad pitch starts. I couldn’t say for certain though, as I haven’t looked at any emails like this.
I’ve been getting the same sorts of spam, in fairly high quantities, for the past few weeks now. I’ve never opened one to see what was in the body though.
I have no idea what the purpose is. My original thought was that someone is trying a variant of the “million monkeys at a million typewriters” theory.
The idea behind the random crap is that it defeats Bayesian spam filtering, which relies on processing the words in the email to determine the likelihood that it’s spam.
And yes, this does mean that your spam filter is reading your mail.
In the short term, it’s working. That is, some spam is getting past Bayesian spam filters. However, it’s not likely to work in the long term, as there are still patterns in the random crap.
That’s the great thing about the Bayesian filter, I guess. For about a week, I got a wave of V 1 C 0 D 1 N!!! emails and the ones in the OP, but I kept religiously clicking Spam. Now, they’re all routed to my spam folder.
It’s the desperate thrashing of spammers trying to get through all the new filters.
I use Netscape mail which has a message filter you configure. I put the url in the body of the message as the flag to delete. I still get some spam, but not the dozens I used to.
