The Poetry of Spam

My friend St. Scott, who also happens to run my domain host, pointed out to me today an article on Silicon.com about how much time is wasted each day dealing with spam, an average 90 minutes a day, 10 hours a week per person. Spam clogs St. Scott's servers so I expect he, Eric, Chuck and the rest of his associates spend more than that as web janitors for the sludge spewed from far and wide. I'm personally concerned because it means it's that much less time you have to read my blog!

As technology evolves to thwart the spammers, the spammers get smarter.

Way back in the early years, 1996, before spam was known as "spam," I was getting spammed something fierce from someone trying to hawk Earl Nightingale books and tapes. I complained about it directly to the person spamming me that he had the wrong address. Spam kept coming. I tried again. Still spammed. I reported his abuse to his domain host. The domain host, who apparently was making a good living from the Earl Nightingale guy, said that my domain had signed up to receive the spam. "I'm the only one on my domain, I didn't sign up for it," I told him. Doesn't matter, he retorted, my domain had signed up for it. Huh? Nonetheless, he then promptly threatened the people running my ISP that he would shut them out -- block every message, IP, etc. coming from and going to my ISP -- if I continued to complain about the spam. My ISP, a local company that was only getting $20 a month from me, said that while they were located in Baton Rouge and he was in Chicago, he could do it because he was some kind of feeder point. They said they couldn't take the chance on being blocked and losing their customer base. And they told me to pack up, take a hike and find another provider. Besides, they said, I had spammed a bunch of Hindus and Muslims with an internet snowball fight. I had. So I walked.

That was old school spammer defense: Try to kill the complainant. Threaten the ISP. Nowadays spam is filtered through advanced heuristics, bits of code that select code words used by spammers to stop them in their tracks. But the spammers have ways past this, and there is near poetry in their anti-anti-anti-missile defense.

The other day I received a piece of porn spam promising near mystical feats with barnyard animals. Sensing it was potential screenplay material that would finally garner Martin Scorsese a "Best Director" nod from the AMPAS Hollyweird leftists, or a tip into the next MTV-produced Superbowl halftime show, I peered into it.

While waiting for the .GIFs of requited bovine love to download from the server in Malaysia or China or where ever the spam was from, I viewed the text contents:

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. The only time you run out of chances is when you stop taking them. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. The quality of the moment is more important than the number of our days. I'll moider da bum. Those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little order, will lose both and deserve neither. Etc.

The spammers had learned to use the most beautiful combinations of words the world has to offer as shielding against the heuristics. You could program the heuristics to glean out messages containing quotes from the great writers and great humorists of the English language, but what kind of world would that leave us? A piece of spam might say we'd be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Perhaps the spammers -- in an effort to thwart the thwarters -- have unconsciously developed a new art form, a poetry of nonsense, like this inclusion in a piece of spam claiming to sell prescription drugs:

cargoes clare conant
bimolecular boom bipartite
brownian decade demit
breakthrough bewitch beograd
aquarius ashamed
busy buckskin

I'm pretty sure the "Poetry Generator" software package I'd once viewed produced something quite similar to this.

The e-mail is similar to some our most annoying citizens. We don't like how they dress, we don't like where they're from: N, E, W, S. We don't like their music. In fact, they're rude, crude and socially unacceptable. And they fight our wars. And they protest the bloodshed. And they die for us when they don't even know us. And they scream bloody murder when the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are trampled. And they speak the politically incorrect truth when it's still the truth. Every rose has its thorn; and sometimes the thorns will bring a rose.

I don't have a solution to the spam problem. I wish I did. I don't really think there is one. We develop a missile; they develop an anti-missile. And so it goes, ad infinitum. I try to learn a lesson from every problem and maybe the lesson here is that there is beauty in the blemish, and if you try to extinguish the blemish, you'll no longer have the beauty either.

Or maybe the lesson here is you can tell your boss/spouse/significant other/readers that the reason you opened the porn spam in the first place is to see if it contains poetry or famous sayings. Because at the very least, porn spam beats the hell out of Earl Nightingale book-hype spam any day of the week, and the poetry justification is a good excuse.