A recent post by a spambot on the GameSoc forums. I must say that coming from a spam-bot, that’s pretty funny.
And it was finally pointed out to me what the point of random, meaningless spam actually is. It’s to confuse Bayesian spam filters. If most spam is randomly generated with no discernible pattern, then all spam becomes far more difficult to automatically filter out. Why this didn’t occur to me before, I don’t know.
I had been led especially to wonder about the subject on receiving a piece of spam on Monday night with the delightful subject line of “I cadaverous a buttock”, with an excerpt from Emma, by Jane Austen, as the body text. I had been wondering for some time exactly what the point of this randomly generated spam actually was, and I wish the answer had occurred to me sooner.
(Incidentally, both the user and post above have since been deleted.)