Are you getting spam from Jane Austen?
Bill is! And we’ve heard from other Janeites that they are getting spam containing passages from Pride and Prejudice. Many find it a tad creepy, as though the spammers are tailoring their junk to the recipient. How can they KNOW?
Here at AustenBlog World Headquarters, Dorothy cleans up stray spam, so we generally do not read our spam e-mails; but we found this article at the BBC explaining why spammers are including passages from classic literature in their missives.
By including random text the spammers hope to fool the filters into thinking that a human, not a spammer, wrote the message.
[. . .]
But as Clive Thompson points out, automatically generating text that reads like it was written by a human hand is difficult. This is perhaps why some spammers are turning to out-of-copyright novels for their text. It is an ideal source of real writing.
The article is from 2003, but it looks like the spammers now like Jane Austen as much as we do!
November 11th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Wow, I thought it was just me!