smokerblog

spam haiku

One of the (many) nice things about using the Macintosh platform is getting Apple's Mail client included as part of the operating system. Sure, it's not perfect, but I haven't found an email client yet that fits my needs perfecly. Besides, Mail is free.

I didn't care much one way or the other about Apple's junk mail filter until I started using it. Now, I think it's great. Others have reported mixed results, but I only receive a couple spam messages a day that slip through the filter (out of more than 100) and only one message or so a month that registers as a false positive. I still have to occassionally skim through my junk mail folder to double-check and recently I found a couple of interesting spam trends.

One way that spammers try to fool junk mail filters is by sprinkling semi-random innocuous words throughout a message. Sometimes (okay, rarely) this results in some interesting not-quite poetry:

Their soft cat is on fire.
Their odd shaped t-shirt smells.
A round-shaped spoon is angry the time that whose soft printer sleeps.
His brothers noisy sofa stands-still.

So it's not that great. There's a certain amount of shock value in the first couple of lines and I can totally imagine how a round-shaped spoon might be angry. But then yesterday an email that evaded my filter startled me with its haiku-nature:

no degree no job
get a instant university degree
no neeed study or test

Even though it doesn't exactly conform to my haiku standards, I still was afraid that someone had specially targeted me after reading my site. The sad thing is, this spam might make better haiku poetry than much of what I've done so far...