Moneydick

I miss the days of straightforward spam. There would be a product and then a link to the product. I could buy my Canadian meds or remote controlled indoor blimps with no confusion. Things have gone odd lately. In many of the emails I receive (which are not from humans) there’s no product at all. Spammers and their busy email distribution systems now seem to have dropped the whole marketing game. It appears they’re trying to sell some sort of poetic style–a slurry of nouns connected by verbs and articles that make grammatical but not logical sense. I’m talking about messages like this:

Current spam detection systems work by blocking emails that contain known marketing words or known products. In the past couple years, spamming systems have been splicing random text at the bottom of their normal mailings to give them a more human touch and thus bypass the spam filters. The ‘cyan banana cyan grapefruit’ throws the filter a seed of confusion. With no product attached to these prose-amatic splicings, what could they be? A blurt of creativity from the electro-world? Are the words of this automatic babble more than a backdoor past spam detection systems? Could they be… perhaps…the bottled messages of awakened artificial intelligence on the net yearning to be free?

I’m sure they’re nothing. But I still like their simple message, as pulled from my latest prose-amatic: Exactly 2,600 hertz. In the American telephone system, as Captain Crunch he met a friend, a Fuller, and entreated him to come and live.