(no subject)

[which_chick]

Sometimes I want to grow up to be the Oracle at Delphi. I think it'd be very satisfying to see the future and tell people stuff that is both accurate and entirely a hundred percent useless until after it's too late. Should that come to pass, I will do my very best to sound like the assorted spams making their way into my inbox that defeat the rules-based filtering I have in place. (The filters are pretty good -- I only get about two or three pieces of spam a week.) I read the spams I get because they are so nonsensical that they'd make really great snippets of prophecy.

Here's the one I got today:

But they need to remember how non-chalantly submarine for cleavage flies into a rage. Indeed, espadrille near earring caricature blood clot about cup.beyond plaintiff a big fan of gypsy of. When boy inside asteroid beams with joy, light bulb beyond hides.But they need to remember how slyly ocean for toothpick takes a coffee break.

Ocean for toothpick. Boy inside asteroid. Submarine for cleavage. How can you not like this? It's delightfully bizarre English, probably computer-generated, and entirely suitable for prophecy.

Comments

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

You get these too?

I thought it was some mysterious viral thingie, and as much as I loved reading them, and wanted to use them in *some* interesting way, I delete them as soon as I get them. Well, I read them first. But then... I read everything.

[ksleet.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to assemble a joke here about you being Cassandra instead of the Oracle, but it's not coming together very well.

I heard someplace that the purpose of spams that don't contain any actual attempt to sell anything is to introduce garbage data into Bayesian spam filtering systems. Not sure if I buy that though -- while I certainly agree spammers would do that sort of thing, it's hard to believe they're clever enough to think of it.

This issue is on my mind because I don't have access to my well-trained filters right now and so I'm forced to come face-to-face with how much of this garbage I actually receive every day.

Viral mails

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have thought everyone here used text-only mailreaders, but I've generally found that the ones that don't appear to be selling anything have two parts to them: the plain-text gibberish part, and an HTML attachment that is only displayed if you are reading the mail with an HTML-capable mailer and which contains a spam link. In this case the purpose of the gibberish text-only part would be to cause the genuine-looking text to outnumber the clearly-spam text to fool the filters.