Monday, September 13, 2010

Highfalutin spam

I like Blogger's spam filter for comments. It saves me loads of time. Occasionally, a piece of spam slips through, or gets to my email to notify me of a new comment, despite it being labelled spam.

I saw an amusing one the other day:
Despatch Master in a post department told to a little woman,”You possess to present another subdue on this learning as it is too heavy.
The maidservant replied, “How would an ancillary stamp make it lighter.”
Despite it not making much sense, I recognized it for an old joke I know. The spammers are apparently taking existing, normal text, and running it through a thesaurus so that they don't end up posting the same spam text on multiple blogs and websites. Like that, they hope to evade the spam filters. But they do this programmatically, so that they can do this automatically. This leads to some rather silly substitutions. For example, the postal worker presumably said "You have" which was changed to "You possess." Heh.

A quick Google Internet Search yielded the following source text:
Post Master in a post office told to a woman,”You have to put another stamp on this letter as it is too heavy.
The woman replied, “How would an extra stamp make it lighter.”
The one word match which seems strange is "letter" to "learning". I am not sure why their thesaurus suggested it. Perhaps because it has a stemmer and an automatic word form generator. Then, "lettered" would accord with "learning".

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