Comments on: CONTEST: EXPLAIN THIS MESSAGE

By: Mark Hasty

Mark Hasty — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

This might explain it:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/804/4344369.html

(James Lileks' cloumn from yesterday)

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

A bit of conjecture:

That is a passage from the Either the 'Wizard of Oz' or 'Alice in Wonderland.' (forget which)

Often programmers will put in a hunk of text as a place holder to be replaced later. (ie "put spam message here")

Possibly the guy that wrote the spamming software put that in the blank message and the spammer did not remove it all as they were preparing the spam.

I once knew a programmer that almost lost his job over a Hamlet line. He put "âSomething is rotten in the state of Denmark" into a text place holder only to have someone from Denmark think it was aimed at them.

By: Mike Trettel

Mike Trettel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

The spammers are trying to poison filtering databases created by Bayesian type spam filtering prgrams such as Popfile and K9. These kinds of spam filters are semi-intelligent in that they create a database on the fly as to what to consider spam, and so can rather quickly catch all the usual variations upon viagra, porn, wonderful Nigerian enrichment schemses, and what not. That's why you've been seeing all these spams with random gibberish in them, these were an initial attempt to first fool, and then later to poison the spam filtering databases by inserting bogus words to filter upon. Unfortunately (for the spammers) Bayesian filtering can quickly catch on to the idea of inserting random gibberish read from a dictionary, so it looks as if they're going to the next step-inserting whole text quotations from what appears to be some literary work of some kind. The idea is to fool the filters one more time-since the quote isn't just random gibberish combined with a viagra pitch. Instead it actually reads like real text combined with a viagra pitch.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

hmmmm Mark and I posted within seconds of each other.

Lileks' theory is plausible but to me, improbable. Spammers don't care if the addy is valid and if they did, why not just test it with another spam?

Or why not just put the letter "a" in the body.

And what would explain you getting spam and goofy text in the same message...

I'm off to see the wizard (google) on this one.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Mike gets the award. Wired

By: Mike Trettel

Mike Trettel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Forgot to mention-I use both K9 and Popfile upon the various household computers. Once past the initial training period of about a week both filters are nearly perfect in catching and deleting spam, including the random gibberish and quotation schemes. The Lileks article referred to above is only part of why the spammers are doing this, but the real problem for the spammers is that these kinds of filters are very hard to beat once they are set up.

By: Misanthropyst

Misanthropyst — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

...Joyce...

By: Little Miss Attila

Little Miss Attila — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Joyce makes sense.

It certainly isn't either *Through the Looking Glass,* or *Alice in Wonderland.* Those, I know.

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