Poetry is probably not top of the list of things you expect to see in the spam and junk mail messages landing in your inbox everyday. But lots of people are starting to find literary value hidden among the porn, penis patches, generic Viagra deals and mortgage offers.
Some have composed poems using the subject lines of the spam they receive; others are creating verse using the strings of strange words that are often found inside spam messages.
A lucky few have even found excerpts of novels buried in spam.
Text message
Blogger and journalist Clive Thompson found an excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Master Key by Wizard of Oz author L Frank Baum in a message that had as its subject line "the big unit" (no prizes for guessing what the rest of it was hawking).
This is happening because of the success of spam filters, the best of which can catch 99% of junk mail.
These filters work by scanning the words in e-mail messages to identify which ones spammers prefer and which ones are favoured by your friends and colleagues.
For a while now spammers have tried to defeat these filters by breaking up offending words with full stops to produce subject lines like e.hance your attra.ctiveness.
Unfortunately for the spammer, this just makes spam even easier to spot.
Some spammers have taken to inserting decidedly non-spammy words in e-mail to try to convince the filters they are not junk mail.
As a result spam is starting to appear with phrases such as "bernadine rustle lappet" and "arboretum severe acerbity henri" inside them.
A few words are unlikely to make a lot of difference to the filters so some spammers load their junk mail with huge amounts of random words. One recent message had 780 words of nonsense in it.
By including random text the spammers hope to fool the filters into thinking that a human, not a spammer, wrote the message.
View: Full Article | Source: BBC News
