As much as we all hate spam, a lot of work goes into sending it out. From a spammers perspective, there's millions of potential customers, with only a single piece of software between them and us -- the spam filter.

I ran across an article which looks at the next wave of spam. The problem is, that our spam filters are getting too good. They look at text, and differentiate human to human interaction from advertisements.

The obvious thing, if you were a spammer, is to create spams which appear more personal, more human. How? Well, they've begun including text from novel's where the copyright has expired. It's also been noticed that spams have been getting longer -- are spam filters are unlikely to be fooled by just a few words, so they need to add lots. An example is a spam I have here in my inbox offering extended auto warranties.. there is text in the body of the email which reads:

She laughed bitterly. Anne slipped her arm around her. "Leslie, is it that you have learned to care for Mr. Ford?" Leslie turned herself about passionately. "How did you know?" she cried. "Anne, how did you know? Oh, is it written in my face for everyone to see? Is it as plain as that?" "No, no. I--I can't tell you how I knew. It just came into my mind, somehow. Leslie, don't look at me like that!" "Do you despise me?" demanded Leslie in a fierce, low tone.

I did a search, and found that the above text is from Anne's House of Dreams.

I'd be surprised if spam filters couldn't catch text like the above. But this is cat and mouse, just like viruses. Spam filters get better, spam finds it's way through, spam filters get better yet, yada yada yada. My boss keeps saying that spam is going to make email useless. I can see his case, though it can be said that viruses haven't made computers useless.

"I don't think you any of those things. Come, dear, let's just talk it over sensibly, as we might talk over any other of the great crises of life. You've been brooding over it and let yourself drift into a morbid view of it. You know you have a little tendency to do that about everything that goes wrong, and you promised me that you would fight against it."

"But--oh, it's so--so shameful," murmured Leslie. "To love him--unsought--and when I'm not free to love anybody."

"There's nothing shameful about it. But I'm very sorry that you have learned to care for Owen, because, as things are, it will only make you more unhappy."