Utterly Meaningless

I get them too. Sometimes they seem to have words related to emails I’ve received, although others are completely random. I have no clue as to their purpose, though. Somebody with too much time on their hands and a strange sense of humor?

They might be the result of some kind of e-mail virus on someone else’s machine, or perhaps they are test messages assessing the validity of a list of addresses — advanced scouts for future spam, if you will.

I think they are trying to poison they Bayesian algorythem that power most of the better anti-spam tools.

That sounds plausible. But don’t they usually have that nonsense stuff in addition to an actual spam message?

Here’s an article on the phenomenon from Wired:

wired....0.html

Yeah – I’m pretty sure its to tweak the Bayesian statistics…

One plausible but slightly tinfoil-hattish possibility is that it’s some kind of code. If you really want to communicate securely, you send a message in code out to your comrades-in-arms, and to 10,000 other people.

Spam is increasingly attracting the attention of the cops, but if you communicated like this, you’d wind up with the spam-patrol, and not the organized-crime task force or the Tom Ridgies after you.

The text is to distract the word filters.

Often the spam-advert is sent as a .jpeg image, which the filters cannot dissect. Perhaps your odd spam had an image that couldn’t appear.

I am also receiving spams with jokes included to trip the filters. Some are amusing.

Spammers keep at it because it works on enough people to make it profitable.

Among anti-spam activists, this is a widely known effort to evade filtering, indeed. While some folks see no message because they wisely disable HTML in their mail clients, it is also the result of incompetent spammers. They get their spamware from someone else, and fail to fill in all the blanks properly. If you learn to read mail headers, you may see from time to time some amazing incompetence in failing to fill in the variables there.