Random Word Spam

It’s a message from the past! Quick! Where’s the DeLorean?

Is it a coded Al Q’aieda message? You should forward it to The Department of Homeland Security, just in case.

These messages perplex me too. I can’t at least understand the motive behind advertising spam (evil though it may be). Who is taking the time to send these things? Viruses perhaps?

Random word spam says something about the nature of vandalism. Perhaps the ultimate example of Marshall MacLuhen’s “the medium is the message” is now upon us. It seems only the vehicle interests these spamshiners; just the prospect of getting it past all the filters is sufficient motivation. (reminds me of the spray-on violence committed by so many “artists” in the alleys and dark streets of our nation against the property and lives of the innocent — in fact it *has to be* the same debauched mind-set which causes these two phenomena)

My sister (Halifax) bought Aliant High Speed internet self install on December 17th. She tried installing it on the 19th. It connected, but wouldn

Here’s what I’ve tentatively concluded: these messages, which contain no content other than the random words, are sent out so that the email address in question has some chance of being seen as a “valid” or “whitelisted” email address. I would assume that following along shortly will be actual content-containing spam from the same email address.

Here is a Wired article all about as well.

Here’s something else: it seems like I am getting spam from names tyhat are vaguely familiar. It’s as if spammers are somhow mining my address book and cobbling together identities that look trustworthy to the quick scanning eye. I have no proof that anything like this is happening, but there are uncanny incidents. So far there have been no spam messages from real names, but my friend Harrison’s first name seems to get appended to my frind Michale’s last name, and I get spam from Harrison Herman. Weird. Spam paranoia

The random word spams are an attempt to break the Bayesian filtering used by Spam Assasin, Mozilla and other anti-spam tools. Explained simply, Bayesian filtering works by applying a score value to all words in an email. When you receive a mail, you mark it as spam or not spam. If you mark the mail as spam, a negative score is applied to each word in the mail. If you mark it as not spam, a positive score is applied. Over a fairly short period of time, you have ‘trained’ your spam filter to block spam because words that are commonly found in spam mails are given a strong negative value. Adding up the scores of the words in the mail will give a positive or negative value. Negatives are marked as spam. The random word mails are trying to break the Bayesian filters by marking down words that would normally appear in a legitimate mail. P.S. Putting your email address on a website is a certain way to attract spam. Try to hide it using joe(at)here(dot)com or other techniques.

architecture penguin catalogue misanthrope boilerplate unnecessary bus recent multiple random generation reply your neighborhood here meaningless modern decay ware idiosyncratic polymath and also to you amen typo giveaway subjunctive sesquipedalian dance

To block unsolicited email, insist that people place a keyword in the email title, and create a rule which turfs all emails which do not sport the keyword. Simple!