Spam is getting weirder and weirder. I just received a message titled “Refinance Before it’s to Late.. Rates Going UP”, which is pretty typical fare in my inbox. What wasn’t typical was the text content of the message:
As correspondent to thy martial thoughts,
Live long, my sons, with endless happiness,
And bear firm concordance amongst your selves.
Obey the counsels of these fathers grave,
That you may better bear out violence.
It’s a short passage from the obscure play The Tragedy of Locrine, which may or may not have been written by Shakespeare. Cognitive dissonance reigns supreme in this email message. I wasn’t expecting to see iambic pentameter when I opened this mail.
The message is made all the more surreal by the fact that my mailer (Mutt) is text-only; the actual spam content of the mail is entirely in HTML, so it’s automatically hidden unless I go digging for it. From my perspective, there is absolutely no connection between the subject line and the contents.
It’s interesting how a spammer’s attempt to attach tracking information to a message becomes an exercise in surrealist writing.
2 Comments
It’s either tracking info or, more likely IMHO, just randomly added text that will aid in getting around mail and spam filters.
Yeah, I’d thought about the tracking info idea, though usually that takes the form of random gibberish on the subject line. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, though: what better text to include but Shakespeare if you’re attempting to include “real English” that gets around spam filters?
This message did get around Bogofilter, by the way, which I’ve had installed for a month and a half now. It’s a truly stellar filter, relying on Bayesian statistical analysis to tell spam apart from real mail. I reclassified the message as spam, so there’s a good chance that I won’t see too many Shakespearean email messages in the future. It’s kind of sad, in a way.