Spam and nonsense

A come-on for barnyard pornography devolves into "faurm galz bing e rottic." Another pitch promises to reveal "Seakrets of ((eks-eks-eks)) stars."

Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these orthographic monsters crouching in your in-box, there is reason to take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to recognise the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect. The spammers' messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths.

From The New York Times, via Smart Mobs

See also: MIT's 2004 Spam Conference
Plus: Stewart is keeping a log of 'Good Spam' in his sidebar and Alice is wondering about the eBay potential of vintage spam