Blogtrek

Spam Gibberish

It is now my opinion that eventually spam will become gibberish. It will mean absolutely nothing. The reason is this. When spam originated, its intent was to have the recipient buy something or do something (like pass a chain letter or a diatribe) for the sender. It was like mass marketing. Therefore, words like free, credit, mortgage and so forth appeared in the body and subject of spam. This made a good way of detecting spam: if it had free in the subject, then it was spam. Of course then we have to spell free as frie or something like that in the subject of emails to prevent spamkillers from classifying them as spam and deleting them.

Well guess what? The spammers have figured this out too. Now they send gibberish strings like lnwfdlnvple in their subjects, have email addresses that start with numbers such as 18339829, and misspell viagra as v_iagra. This means they are delivering less fruitful content and more nonsense. We defend ourselves against the fruitful content that they do have by using these as keywords. They respond by messing up these words or replacing them with gibberish. This will keep up over and over again in a cycle until the spammers send a completely random string of symbols in both the subject and the body. So spam emails will be 100% gibberish.

If this is a majority of the email traffic in the world, this email traffic will become the greatest emitter of white noise ever devised.