Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning surrealism in spam

--- In metatuning@yahoogroups.com, kraig grady <kraiggrady@a...>
wrote:
> often i get spam that will open with strange series of words and
> sometimes what appears to resemble surrealistic poetry.
> What is the purpose or cause of this , if amnyone knows?

It is one of the automated devices that spammers use to try to fool
spam filters. For a while they would just mail out an attachment or
link, and filters looked for essentially 'empty' emails. Then they
realized that if they filled it with some kind of text, it would
appear more like an apparent 'good' email, especially if the phrases
weren't trackable by normal email/spam patterns. Someone has
obviously made little auto-generating text programs, calling words
from a dictionary of some sort.

If I get time later tonight, I'll post two things: one guy sent me an
email in which he had collected a number of auto-generated subject
lines, which are zen-like in their hilarity. I should also post an
old DOS program that is really a lot of fun called Babble.

It is like a mixing studio for text: it looks at a text document,
analyzes it, and then can spew forth similar phrases. But where it
gets fun is you can load up to 4 differing kinds of text, and then
use sliders, in real time, to vary the percentages of each of the
styles. It comes with stuff already in it, like Shakespeare, menus
from Chinese restaurants, etc. Pretty ingenious little widget.

I once fed it a few texts from a notorious writer in the microtonal
world. I swear the things it generated were virtually
indistiguishable from the source!

Cheers,
Jon

Here is a rather nice example I got today:

</HEAD><title>depositor,been sitting here</title>
<BODY>
<div align="center">
<a href="http://makingthemost.net/xxxxxx/yyyyyy/">
<img src="http://makingthemost.net/xxxxxxx/blueno.gif" border="0"></A>

</div>tachometer,nodded the woeful,dwarves,explaining this little,snobbish,fear the vengeance.headlight,involuntarily moved
apart;,purgation,silence that reigned.
</BODY></HTML>

I'm pretty sure the http://makingthemost.net/xxx/blueno.gif
will be linked to my e-mail address and is just a virutal
url so that they will know who looked at it if
were to view it on-line. That may be its only purpose,
to get you to read it. If you view it on-line you
probably get added to a spammer's database of e-mails.

I've replaced the actual letters there with xxxxxx/yyyyyyy (original has three
letters each) in case anyone clicks on it in this
post and puts me onto the spammer's list!

Robert

surrealism in spam

🔗kraig grady <kraiggrady@...>

🔗Jon Szanto <JSZANTO@...>

🔗Robert Walker <robertwalker@...>