A (spam) mail with the above subject line arrived at my inbox. It appears that spammers have no more choice but to totally screw their own message, in order to get around the baysian filters. I'm not sure what the actual message is trying to sell. Something about the good qualities of a vigra for my seual health.
Ok, so you may be wondering why I'm so happy. The reason is the return on investment aspect of things.
Here goes - spam is so common because the return on investment for sending spam is so huge. You spend nickels sending millions of messages, and get several bucks in return from the 0.5% of actual buys. Recent trends, however, are eroding this ROI away. Either because better filters cause the number of people who buy to decrease, or because striger control over open relays increase the costs of sending. We all know that by now, of course.
This is a new one, however. This means that in order to pass the baysian filters, spammers are begining to make their own messages incoherent. I can't imagine how that can help their actual buy percentage.
This is good because of another aspect of things. This suggests that there are people who are running spam filters, and even baysian spam filters, who actually buy stuff advertised in spam. In other words - baysian spam filters are now common enough for ordinary "clueless" people to use. Presumably, spammers only started doing these changes because they saw their return dimminish.
Then again, maybe not. For example - I'm confounded if I can understand why spammers will vigorously spam people who ask to be removed. Presumably, if someone asks to be removed, he is highly unlikely to ever buy something from you. Spamming him again will only cost you the (insignificant, but still) money, with almost no hope of seeing any back. I'm not sure what this means about the above logic.
For example, it may just mean that spammers want to spam. They don't care whether people actually buy stuff. They spam like we write software.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Systems Consulting http://www.lingnu.com/
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