Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Surreal Spam

Has anyone else noticed how surreal spam is getting these days? I am referring to unsolicited emails obviously, not the blended lips and scrotums pretending to be ham that you get in tins. Today I have received a number of emails for viagra. But the message was:

"Hi,

AMBIvEN
VIAGvRA from $3,35
CIALxIS from $3,75
VALIvUM from $1,20

burrahobbit? said they a bit startled. Trolls are slow in the uptake, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them. Whats a burrahobbit got to do with my pocket, anyways? said William"

What the fuck is that about? And the previous message had the following pearls of wisdom:

"hearts. Long hours in the past days Thorin had spent in the treasury, and the lust of it was heavy on him. Though he had hunted chiefly for the Arkenstone, yet he had an eye for many another wonderful thing that"

Eh? Is this some sort of plan to bypass anti-spam software? Or is it simply proof that anyone who thinks that spamming actually works is insane?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have never spammed, and don't condone the practice of spamming ... but my "friend" ;) has ... and according to "him" all of that stuff will be to get past a spam filter.

By including irrelevant, but correctly constructed non-commercial sentences the spam e-mail is more likely to fool the filter into thinking that it is an genuine e-mail. So, to answer your question, yes, it's a anti-anti-spam software technique.

Chez Guevara said...

I also remember the bizarre ones that would have 'Hexagon Octopus' in the title... I began to suspect some sort of Dave Gorman-type Googlewhacking conspiracy.

By the way, anonymous... your 'friend' that spams. Does 'he' actually get any business at all from spamming? Or is it simply an attempt at fame and glory?