Way Off Topic: Spam Question

[Magnusfarce]

I sometimes see very odd spam content that appears to be the result of some
sort of writing program that substitutes odd words in what would otherwise
be normal looking prose. I've seen this many times over the last several
years and cannot imagine why it exists. I know this is very much off topic,
but this is a generally sharp and helpful group, so I thought I'd risk the
group's wrath and pose the question anyway.

- Magnusfarce

 

[Mike T.]

I sometimes see very odd spam content that appears to be the result of some
sort of writing program that substitutes odd words in what would otherwise
be normal looking prose. I've seen this many times over the last several
years and cannot imagine why it exists. I know this is very much off
topic, but this is a generally sharp and helpful group, so I thought I'd
risk the group's wrath and pose the question anyway.

- Magnusfarce

It's a way to try to bypass spam filters (make the message look different
from the other 1,000,000,000 copies of the same spam message). It doesn't
work very well, but spammers never were very smart. -Dave

 

[Jeff]

It's a way to try to bypass spam filters (make the message look different
from the other 1,000,000,000 copies of the same spam message). It doesn't
work very well, but spammers never were very smart. -Dave

"doesn't work very well" is much a matter of definition. If only a few of
those messages go through and only a handful are successfully responded to,
it works good enough to make continuing worthwhile.

The other purpose is to make the majority of the content look as close to
legitimate as possible for two reason: a) to make that particuar email
bypasses spam filters, and b) to make self-learning filters make so many
mistakes that people stop using them. In just the last few weeks, I've
noticed that some of the spam that uses embedded graphics files has also
started making the words appear in other than a straight line and has
embedded small imperfections. Both techniques are used to fool optical
character recognition programs that can convert the graphics to text.

What I would really like to know is who in their right mind would buy stock
based upon some nonsense spam that they received. There obviously are enough
people that would to make this profitable for the spammers, because I am now
getting that type of spam almost exclusively in the mailboxes that I use for
public email lists.

Jeff