My own private Oprah book club.
Not all spam is poetry ... Sometimes it's literature.
Generating
(apparently automatically) random strings of words
isn't the only method of fooling spam filters. Sometimes full sentences from novels
are posted into messages in order to cause the filters to think
that a "real" message is being sent. It's via this system that I've
read parts of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini.
E-mail spam seems also to have caused Jeff
Davis, a blogger in North Carolina, to take a special interest in Captain
Blood. He also has an important observation on why not everyone actually sees
these texts.
But Captain Blood was only my first exposure to this phenomenon. When I first
encountered it, I wasn't even sure what was happening, and had to paste a
string of text into Google in order verify that this was an "authentic"
text. Since then I've been collecting these, sort of making a list of books that
I might sometime get around to reading. I've received, for instance, a couple
of passages from Misery by Stephen King (never read it, but I've seen parts of
the movie) and (we're talking high culture here) The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov which I read many years ago and enjoyed immensely.
And while working on this column a piece of
spam arrived that used: By the time Scarlett had undressed
and blown out the candle, her plan for tomorrow had worked itself out in every
detail. It was a
I didn't have to go far to figure out where this was from. (Actually, I prefer
it when the spammer makes me work.) Still, I wanted to know if Gone With the Wind,
like Captain Blood, was appearing with much frequency in spam messages. It's apparently
very new, a rising, star on the filter dodging horizon. But I also discovered
that, although the book is still under (very strict) copyright restrictions in
the United States a full
text version is available via the Australian version of Project Gutenberg
where it is already in the public domain.
Go to: Spamming me softly with his song