The Email Wars

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..

1. Viagra

2. XXX Fun

3. Nigerian Bank Assistance

Spam Lit (also known as Lit Spam and Literary Spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are made up, others are passages from public domain works (such as Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible), and others are conglomerations of several creative public domain works, which can often be copied off the web and included in e-mail messages hawking software, male enhancement pills, and computers.

At first, e-mail recipients believed that the mysterious Spam Lit appearing in their inboxes had something to do with “keyword spamming”, which is the practice of embedding a list of topics unrelated to the core message and hoping that these topics would land the e-mail into the right demographic mailbox.

A spammer often sends one spam message to millions of mailboxes, and if only .1% of the recipients bite, that is still a huge profit. So it would be worth the spammer’s time to cobble together a text based on literary texts.

However, Spam Lit exists primarily for a more insidious reason: to circumvent the powerful spam filters developed by

Google, Yahoo, AOL, and other e-mail providers, which have been “trained” to recognize the characteristics of typical spam words, such as “click here,” “free (product name),” and certain pornographic terms. Spammers have learned to place their target terms in images and unrelated text for the spam filters.

One of three things will happen to an e-mail message: it will land in the recipient’s inbox, it will be routed to the recipient’s spam folder, or it will be blocked. Spammers want that message to end up in the recipient’s inbox, and they have figured out that spam filters look for certain textual patterns, such as overused product references, and evidence of an actual text message.

Thus, in an attempt to circumvent spam filtering, the spammer creates a Spam Lit e-mail, typically consisting of an image (which the spam bots cannot read, at least as of 2007) with the product name, the Spam Lit text, and a link, which directs the recipient to a website or parking page, filled with ads. Often these are hit and run pages, deleted after the spammer has made his or her profit and moved onto other quick profit websites, which are often scam sites.

As found in Wikiopedia: 

Palladio who beckons from the other shore,
Floating on the sky.
The road, but not far enough ahead
The road, but not far enough ahead
giddy as good kids playing hookey. Now,
Late February, and the air’s so balmy
Wheezing ravens, when
Snow haze gleams like sand.
Only a whiter absence to my mind,
So you can watch me watch uplifted snow
Gray the cloud-like oaks
XIII. The Route to the North
then takes a step back, to be safe as she reaches.
grow hot in the parking lot, though they’re
I’ve drifted somewhat from the distant heart
That square—Oh, 56 x 56
Preface to the 1970 Edition
As if your human shape were what the storm
XX. To the Pole

Learn more about it at: 

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/scriptures-from-the-future/

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/07/spam_poetry.html