30 Comments on “The Transporting Poetry of Spam Coding”

1. Is that the actual coding? Interesting. I’m guessing it’s variable to avoid being filtered.

2. 3.3. Cumm1ng5.php?

3. Man, that gave me a headache after about the first five lines. At least you had the good sense to delete it!

   :-)

4. Why, John! You think you’re the only recipient? I just deleted the same item from my spam queue last night.

   I must admit, though, that I did not, at the time, observe the odd elfin beauty of the syntax..

5. I suggest that all future articles be written like this one.

6. Interesting. The bang | character is a common separator so it sure does look like that was meant to be fed into some sort of parser which would pick one of the items within the {} delimiters. I’d guess it’s done that way to slow down the systems that filter spam based on seeing identical messages going to a huge number of disconnected people, like the way Rackspace says here they do global-level analysis.

7. Were you supposed to circle the word you liked? Or perhaps they were to circle the appropriate word and forgot? o.O

8. Artificial life imitating art.

9. @Don: | isn’t a bang; it’s a pipe. ! is a bang.

10. {since|because|whereas|when in the course of human events} feeling is {first|primary|y’know, there}
    who {pays|pins|purchases|purloins} any attention
    to the {syntax|luxury tax|fiscal cliff} of {things|stuff|whatever}
    will never wholly {kiss|grope|canoodle} you

11. Looks like someone forgot to run the template through the randomizer before sending.

12. @Pavel Lishin Yeah! I could have sworn I read a science fiction short story that was written just like this spam letter. The central conceit was quantum superstates applied to two lovers. Wish I could remember the name.

13. @Greg: A good name for such a story would be I Love You, I Love You Not (already taken by a movie unfortunately). Only instead of flower petals she would make her decision based on paired photon spin state.

14. Thanks for the headache, John Scalzi. I will be sending you a gift basket and card to show you just how grateful I am for the headache you’ve just given me. Thanks a lot, man.

15. Here’s how I read this:

    I have been [VERB ENDING IN -ING] online more than [NUMBER LESS THAN FIVE] hours today, yet I never found any [ADJECTIVE] article like yours. It is [ADVERB] worth enough for me.
    [WEASEL INTRO PHRASE], if all [PLURAL NERD NOUN] and [DIFFERENT PLURAL NERD NOUN] made good [NOUN] as you did, the net will be a lot more [ADJECTIVE] than ever before.

16. And then I deleted it. Because it’s spam, after all.

    Yet here it is at the top of the page. It looks to me like you moved it.

17. I have written a couple of (dirty) poems made up entirely of (sex) spam subject lines. One of them, “You will visit Doctor only in your dreams.”, can be found at: http://www.lespagesauxfolles.ca/index.phtml?pg=45&chap=2316. They are fun, up to a point. And, yes, I deleted them all when done with them.

18. I’ve gotten the (options all selected) version of this, and others praising my content, my ancestry, and my native intelligence, about 100 times on a single test post on a WordPress site I set up. I wonder if it’s specific to WordPress? Hard to imagine there are really 100 people who think “This is a test post” is deathless prose and the website worthy of awards. Funny you got the code version, though.

19. @Greg I could have sworn I read a science fiction short story that was written just like this spam letter. The central conceit was quantum superstates applied to two lovers. Wish I could remember the name.

    There was a story called “Space Opera for (Purists) (Modernists) which told the classic story of a hero who saved the world by obtaining the (spit)(semen) of a rare pangolin, winning the love of the scientist’s (blonde)(blond) (daughter)(son). http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?42840

20. Am I the only one who finds a kind of waltz tempo to this thing?

21. Greg, I’m pretty sure I read the same short story. Like this spam it was oddly poetic, though intentionally so. It’s not the one Andrew references. It was much older, probably from Analog. Dude, it’s going to bug me till I remember. Shit.

22. Huh??

    Listening to Jeff Buckly sing Hallelujah is poetic.

23. “and {it is|it’s} time to be happy.” Well, that’s pretty nice, after all.

24. Transporting or Trainspotting?

25. Well, it sort of works as a stream-of-consciousness piece. What’s really wrong is that I looked at it and thought, I could write enough perl code in a few hours to make the message and the mailing actually work…

    Not that I ever would, mind you…

26. I have a bit of experience in the amusement found in good spam messages:
    http://lodo-bear.livejournal.com/17863.html

27. So beautiful, it looks like it could be published by McSweeney’s…

28. That’s a text spinner – known and loved by SEO spammers everywhere, mostly shows up in comments but used for a hell of a lot more.

    It’s designed so that you set it up once, then the spinner produces so many copies of the text with randomized elements. It’s used to defeat spam filters, and also in articles to beat Copyscape or other plagiarism checkers. (Say you’ve got an article but you want to send it to ten different blogs in order to get backlinks, and they all want unique content? Set it up right in the spinner and you can get as many different versions as you need.)

    If you ever want to know why spam reads rather weirdly, it’s because of these, not because English isn’t their first language. Spammers don’t have the time or patience to make sure every iteration is 100% correct. So in this case, someone is using an all-in-one application to generate and spam WordPress comments, and they forgot to switch on the spinner before posting.

    Source: I know some guys who work for spammers. :P

29. John, OK, you didn’t hit “reply” to the spam email, but it does NOT counts as “deleted” when you copy-pasted it so that you could publish the content to the world!

    Off-topic but also much fun to read, and tangentially related as “poetic”: Michaela Schlocker’s parody of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”

30. More spam poetry – not meta, but pretty special nonetheless (and if this is a double post, my apologies)
    http://www.erfworld.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2919&start=100