I'm getting the same thing too, it doesn't even make any sense.

It's a message from the past! Quick! Where's the DeLorean?

squeak lightbulb nest crate.

Fern mega applesauce.

Is it a coded Al Q'aieda message?

You should forward it to The Department of Homeland Security, just in case.

Not with those almanac connections of yours you shouldn't.

These messages perplex me too. I can't at least understand the motive behind advertising spam (evil though it may be). Who is taking the time to send these things? Viruses perhaps?

Trying to hurt baysien filters maybe?

The emails I don't understand are the ones with a subject, but no body text...

Random word spam says something about the nature of vandalism. Perhaps the ultimate example of Marshall MacLuhen's "the medium is the message" is now upon us.

It seems only the vehicle interests these spamshiners; just the prospect of getting it past all the filters is sufficient motivation. (reminds me of the spray-on violence committed by so many "artists" in the alleys and dark streets of our nation against the property and lives of the innocent -- in fact it *has to be* the same debauched mind-set which causes these two phenomena)

My sister (Halifax) bought Aliant High Speed internet self install on December 17th. She tried installing it on the 19th. It connected, but wouldn’t browse the web. Her new account came with a new email address. I refreshed her computer last weekend, and it now works. When we did a first connection to her email account on January 10th, she had 295 messages, all spam, most with pornographic images. The date of the first message December 22nd. There is no way anything she did could have spread her email. Is Aliant spreading email address’s to spammers, so people will buy Aliant’s anti-spam services? Sorry about being a little “off topic”, but I am still astounded at this.

Is it a tactic of 'fishing' for plausible spam targets? The jarbled nonsense would identify a run of random auto-generated emails and then a simple cross-reference with those which bounce would leave with a list of the real. Then of course they sell the list.

Here's what I've tentatively concluded: these messages, which contain no content other than the random words, are sent out so that the email address in question has some chance of being seen as a "valid" or "whitelisted" email address. I would assume that following along shortly will be actual content-containing spam from the same email address.

Is this the answer?

This is happening because of the success of spam filters, non-sense is the only way through.

Here is a Wired article all about as well.

In response to Shawn, most likely the email address had previously existed and began to get spam then. When someone asks for a specific userid we (ISN) will give it to them with a soft warning if it had been in use before to expect more spam at startup than a new id.

Here's something else: it seems like I am getting spam from names tyhat are vaguely familiar. It's as if spammers are somhow mining my address book and cobbling together identities that look trustworthy to the quick scanning eye.

I have no proof that anything like this is happening, but there are uncanny incidents. So far there have been no spam messages from real names, but my friend Harrison's first name seems to get appended to my frind Michale's last name, and I get spam from Harrison Herman. Weird. Spam paranoia

Hmmm, I was wondering what was going on with these random words and random characters. I think it all comes down to statistics. Many random words means no static pattern to match, plus reduced likelihood of being filtered since there is an overall smaller percentage of spam key words.

We use spam-asassin which lets this kind of message through. It has 19 words followed by a linked-image:

Our US Licensed Doctors will Prescribes Your Medication For Free Medications Shipped Overnight To Your Do. show Me more

The text was followed by 297 random dictionary words.

The random word spams are an attempt to break the Bayesian filtering used by Spam Assasin, Mozilla and other anti-spam tools.

Explained simply, Bayesian filtering works by applying a score value to all words in an email. When you receive a mail, you mark it as spam or not spam. If you mark the mail as spam, a negative score is applied to each word in the mail. If you mark it as not spam, a positive score is applied.

Over a fairly short period of time, you have 'trained' your spam filter to block spam because words that are commonly found in spam mails are given a strong negative value. Adding up the scores of the words in the mail will give a positive or negative value. Negatives are marked as spam.

The random word mails are trying to break the Bayesian filters by marking down words that would normally appear in a legitimate mail.

P.S. Putting your email address on a website is a certain way to attract spam. Try to hide it using joe(at)here(dot)com or other techniques.

Socialist Equality Party announces

US presidential campaign

Support the Socialist Equality

Party in 2004

click here to see the candidates

We urge all our supporters, all those who look to the World

Socialist Web Site for political analysis, and all those who

support a socialist alternative to the big business parties to

become active participants in the SEP 2004 election campaign.

This means, in the initial stage, joining in the effort to place

our candidates on the ballot.

This, in itself, is a serious challenge. In no other advanced

capitalist country is it so difficult for an independent working

class party to exercise the elementary democratic right of gaining

access to the ballot as in the US. Placing Bill Van Auken and

Jim Lawrence on the ballot in all 50 states would require collecting

petition signatures from nearly 750,000 registered voters (150,000

in California alone), as well as tens of thousands of dollars

in filing fees and legal expenses. Placing SEP candidates on the

ballot for the US Senate and the House of Representatives is another

major task. It can be achieved only by developing a grassroots

political movement that will broadly mobilize workers, professionals,

young people and students and extend beyond the election itself,

laying the foundations for the building of a mass socialist party

of the working class.

We place this challenge before our supporters: Join us in the

effort to publicize the SEP campaign, win support for its candidates,

and place them on the ballot in as many states as possible. Decide

yourself to run as an SEP candidate for Congress. Help build the

SEP as the new political party of the working people.

To launch this effort, the SEP is holding a national conference

in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 13-14, 2004. This conference

will discuss the political program of the SEP and the practical

measures to be taken in the campaign. It will launch a nationwide

effort to place Bill Van Auken and Jim Lawrence on the ballot

and organize SEP campaigns for congressional seats, drawing up

plans for an ambitious political mobilization of working people

and young people from coast to coast.

The SEP invites all those who want to join in this campaign

to come to the Ann Arbor conference and take part in the effort

to build a new political party of the working class.

SIZE="-1" FACE="Arial">Click here to volunteer to support the

campaign and to donate to the SEP

The random names of people you know thing has been noticed by me too. I keep getting junk from people whose names sound familiar, but they're not exactly correct. Always makes me look twice, but I can still hit delete faster than the messages can make an impact.

The worrying thing is, someone must really be buying this herbal erection crap if so many spams are trying to sell it.

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The obvious way to filter SPAM at the ISP would be to create fake email addresses, and put them in places where they will be "harvested", like newsgroups, discussion boards, and free email accounts. Then, anything coming to those fake email addresses is SPAM. Find the links in the SPAM, and filter any email (to anyone) conatining the link.

To block unsolicited email, insist that people place a keyword in the email title, and create a rule which turfs all emails which do not sport the keyword. Simple!

A random word email or "word salad" is, as mentioned above, a method of Bayesian poisoning. While word salad filters, yes they are called that, exist; They are not implemented very often.

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad_(computer_science)#Word_salad_filtering