useful technical spam

On a sunny day (Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:21:52 -0700) it happened Winfield Hill wrote in :

It is because those spam mails are generated by 'bots', those generate semi random sentences using words from Usenet or perhaps wikipedia, chaining these together to make something like rabbitsfriendsandrelations, or lowpass sample is a lowpass... etc... The bots are no real people, just badly written programs that put a shame on even AI. Never put your real email address on a website in ASCII, use a picture of it (bots cannot read these very well, character recognition costs resources and real programing skills)). If you MUST publish your email, then get a domain name with unlimited amount of email addresses, and assign one to everybody you correspond with. You will soon find out who plays with bots, delete that email address. I do this with companies I order from over the net, some of the biggest ones are the worst!

Composed by Ubot

"Jan Panteltje"

I had him figured him for a failed space cadet hologram - like " Rimmer " in the sci-fi TV series Red Dwarf.

The " snobby prefect " connection is so spot on.

Graham Stevenson all over.

...... Phil

Yes, I understand that, I'm saying the bot grabs some interesting material, but fails to grab and show the whole thing, which it could easily do. In fact, it could also include the source link, so we could find more detail - then they could include their ad, and we might even read it.

It's an efficiency issue for them. They are putting out a *lot* of spam, and they want each one to contain unique text that is likely to pass a Bayesian filter, so they have the spambots that check webpages for spammable email addresses save chunks of text while they are there.

Maybe it is searching the web for your email address and then picking words from the pages it finds. This way it would be your own words coming back to you. When they harvest email addresses from the usenet, this would sort of come along for free.

I wonder floobydust, if bogometric, I sniglet, will ambihelix, start pyromagnetic, getting encabualtion, these disclomification, words heterolytic, at biunification, snipped-for-privacy@rahul.net homoflangia.

Google seems to be way ahead on this. I'm reading usenet news in Firefox while logged into a google account. On the side are context sensitive text only ads. The ads cost about $0.50 per click, and no cost otherwise. I also read email on google, and some of the ads are more interesting than the mail that triggers them.

The selection is a bit different each time. Some of the displayed "URLs" are abbreviations of the real thing, so I copied the actual links to the news posting also. This specific instance has these ads:

Lowpass Filters Low-cost custom lowpass filters in high performance, low loss designs

Active Filter Designer Simulate low pass, high pass, or band pass filters today! webench.national.com

Low Pass Filters Low Pass filters from 100Hz to 4GHz Find Chebyshev Filters & More

The gibberish is intended to slip this e-mail past fuzzy spam filters and also to pique your interest so that you might actually open it. The vendors that put these things together don't have the time or resources to actually put together any useful information.

You can verify that they grab the text from webpages by searching for phrases from the spam, but I don't think they currently send your own text back to you. The likely reason is that they have a huge list of addresses to spam and the spambots just add more at the top. I once closed down an email address, left it bouncing all incoming mail for three years, recreated it, and saw a bunch of spam the minute it opened.

Put that on a webpage and see.

Hmm, is this some kind of sales pitch to get spammers to pay for each paragraph they quote from AoE? :-)

So what's in it for them to send me a kilobyte or so of jibberish?

If every email cost something to send, even 0.01 cents, most of the spam would vanish.

John

(Concerning spam)

Indeed it would.

Andrew Leung, author of _Spam: The Current State_ estimates that bulk commercial email gets a response rate of around 0.00005, and currently several vendors will send out a million spams for you at a cost cost per spam of 0.005 cents, so the smammer has to make a dollar per sale to break even.

Guy Macon

That would imply work.