Daily dose of literature: via Spam
10 August 2006 at 2:29 pm | NuisanceThere is a new entrant in the battle to give us our daily dose of literary writings. Your common, everyday everyminute SPAM.
Yes, I know what you are thinking. Spam? How? WTF?
Well … I noticed this over the last few days when a few junk messages were slipping past my spam blocker (the awesome, fully free SpamBayes*).
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the last few paragraphs of these mails contained quotes from the classical (Shakespeare, Dickens) to the modern (Rowling) to the obscure (Brian Penton, who?!).
I guess thats smart (smart spammers? I’d rather have fewer of those) … put in some actual text into the body of the email … so your spam blocker either starts identifying Sharespeare and Rowling as spammers or (even worse) lets in these mails because they have a higher percentage probability of being actual emails with legible text that raises very few red-flags in word-count.
August 10th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
I am getting so many spam messages nowadays that I can’t even go through the junk mail box to scan out legitimate emails. Pretty troubling that the spam sorting software could mess up on the erroneous side.
August 11th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
I wouldn’t be too worried. It’s just a matter of time before the spam filters learn that nobody writes like Sharespeare anymore
The smarter ones are those who encode the entire mail in one gaint image. Text based (bayesian) classifiers go running home with their tails between their legs for those.
August 11th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Subhi:
Yeah, that is going to suck, when you have to wade through spam in the “spam” folder instead of the “inbox” folder. Same problem, different folder.
August 12th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Thanks to this post and Bipin’s comment … I now get spam that incorporates the actual spam message into a single giant image AND put in the quoted text from famous books under that image.
Arrrgh.
August 12th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Actually, most spam filters ( even the simplest of them) automatically put hte image emails into junk. That’s the first problem we faced when we started sending out newsletters to our customers.