Spam Prose

A common spam tactic is to send the ad for an item as an image instead of as text. Spam filtering programs quickly caught on to this, so the spammers countered by surrounding and padding the images with lots of text. This fools the Bayesian filters into accepting the note as legitimate email. There are 3 popular techniques used by spammers to generate this fake text: random letters grouped in random lengths, random dictionary words strung together, and random phrases from random books. This last one is often generated with Amazon's new "look or search inside" feature. Sometimes though it leads to some pretty existential subjects and body text, like this one I received yesterday:

Subject: Re: Balance Due, acct Jerome - cyprus mulch toothaches for 970

apartment building make love to customer inside.Bbut they need to remember how non-chalantly minivan defined by pit viper gets stinking drunk.A few trombones, and blithe spirit behind) to arrive at a state of lover. Now and then, over philosopher fall in love with dissident from freight train.

Trombones, freight train dissidents, pit vipers, and non-chalant, drunken minivans, all in a single meme. What more could one want?