I get a lot of spam. I'm on a lot of mailing lists. My email address is very public. I can't change it because its my primary way of getting work.
Over time, you get to see the spammers try new tricks. More and less text. Misspellings. Ads that look like text but are a big image.
The latest trick of the spammers is to put much extra text into the mail message. The goal is that the message payload (you know, "penis enlargement", "viagara" or "business proposition") are invisible to spam filters, since there's so much more distracting text to get in the way of the bayesian analysis. It's a kind of weak steganography.
For a while, the spammers were using just random free association, but today I've started receiving a whole lot of spam that contains excerpts from Cryptonomicon. How did this choose that particular book?
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