Why is spam nonsense

It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Arugula Eruca sativa is an quarterly green, pretended or roquette. It's been Traditional times, overclever 20 flat has be useful to "foodie" movement. Before impediment s, thrill was norm harvested foreign wild.

Colour has naturalized reactionary world, on top of everything elseloftier Europe addition North America. Arugula is all round Mediterranean region, wean away from Morocco and Portugal, eastern Lebanon plus Turkey. Roughly India, adult seeds are songeffortless Gargeer. Solvent is scour Brassicaceae family, rod is quite a distance rocket, which is public What is the purpose behind such spam?

It's annoying, yes, but one assumes that the spammer has some purpose other than to simply annoy to go to the effort of doing this. I don't see any URLs or hot links in the message, and no apparent "funny" formatting that might exploit something. Is this somehow trying to influence web crawlers? And, if so, to what purpose?

Does it somehow exploit some sort of weakness in the forum software? Added: Not really related to the original question -- more of a tangential comment, but I thought it would be worthwhile to keep it in the same place, in case someone else comes looking:. My best guess is that these are people, probably in China, who are learning English and are using the forum as a sort of test, to see if their post goes undetected.

It's unlikely that they're trying to "curry favor" with the spam filter, as the thing "Mollom" is notoriously flaky and happily lets spam through on the first try while rejecting legitimate posts. For about the past year the forum of which I speak has been regularly at least weekly, and sometimes several times a day -- twice so far this morning bombarded with posts such as:. Kitchen Units For Sale. The oddest thing is that the constant spamming has apparently "poisoned" the URL for Google and likely other search engines such that you have to pretty much spell out the URL to get a "hit".

The other odd thing, of course, is that the system operators seem incapable of blocking this, even though the URL is always the same. Since, as I observed earlier, the "kitchen spam" posts seen on dozens of other BBs as well have apparently "poisoned" the associated web site for Google, is it possible that the spam is actually intending to do this, and is instigated by someone a competitor?

By sending lots of correct words and a few words which are used in spam, like viagra, those words get a lower spam notification over time. My observations are that this sort of spam has been the first few posts of a newly created user. After a few of this sort, the normal sort with links included start up.

Disclaimer: I am in the anti-spam industry but I am not officially representing my employer. The first two examples "arugula" and "parroted comments" are Bayesian poisoning. Bayesian poisoning is an attempt to hide spam content among ham content, which aspires to confuse machine learning spam filters.

It does not actually work. The third example "kitchen units" has nothing off-topic e. Bayes poisoning is defined by its off-topic or non-sequitur content and is almost always quite verbose, so this is not Bayes poisoning.

Nonsense spam - messages containing no links or images and which seem to have no discernible purpose - may be harmless themselves, but they are often designed to mask more nefarious activity, according to security analysts.

Nonsense spam typically arrives in barrages, overwhelming an email account and causing the owner to begin rapidly deleting mass quantities of messages, as many as 60, in a hour period. But the messages are a distraction, designed to hide email confirmations, receipts and other legitimate inbox activity which occur when the user of a stolen credit card or bank account is making large purchases. Read the whole story at All Spammed Up ». Toggle navigation.

Free to qualified media, marketing and advertising professionals. A new breed of spam emails popping up especially in Ireland have taken to prefacing their information thieving efforts with random one-or-two-line Harry Potter quotes. Well, only sort of.

While hilariously out-of-context quotes from JK Rowling's spellbinding opus seem to pair with "yoU have 17 nEww private mesages fr0M local singles!!! The latter is key because Bayes Engines use statistics to figure out which words and phrases are associated with spam. So the Harry Potter quotes are meant to fool the system—you know, talk about the sort of wand that might be made of sacred oak and unicorn hair instead of, er Here's where it gets crazy: Bayes Engines learn over time by way of emails being marked as spam.

They catch on pretty quickly, in other words. This why it frequently seems like every spammer is kinda doing the same thing, using the same sorts of phrases, sentences, etc. It comes in waves.

Then, when a topic is exhausted and the mighty Spam Skynet has assimilated it completely, spammers move on to something new—perhaps a bizarre set of words or a news item or a celebrity—in an attempt to fool Bayes Engines again.