The accidental poet: Spammers set their phrasers on stun

By Daniel Rubin
Knight Ridder News Service

"Swaziland bodice debutante."

The words rise from the computer screen and turn into a question mark that sinks itself into the corner of my mouth. Hooked.

The e-mail, once opened, is nothing like what was advertised. It's an ad for a home mortgage. Seduced by word salad.

With a full-scale assault now going on in the war against spam, e-mail marketers have pulled out the heavy artillery to get their messages across:

Poetry.

Their cryptic e-teases appear in subject lines and, more frequently, in auto-preview panes that peek at the body of an e-mail without fully opening it.

"Algonquin Uppercut Fahey."

News of some Irish welterweight street tough who took a beating from a Native American? No, an ad for a digital cable descrambler.

Most times, when you click open the mail, the accidental poetry is gone — in its place is a solicitation for a smaller loan or bigger unit. Duped by digital disappearing ink.

Spammers also have turned to unusual prose to get read — verbatim excerpts from bad term papers on Huck and Jim, bodice-ripping romance novels, and public-domain classics such as "Alice in Wonderland."

"It's just another trick," said Deborah Fallows, author of a Pew Internet and American Life Project study released in October that found unwanted solicitations to be such an annoyance that one in four e-mail users are seeking alternatives to electronic mail. "It's first get the message through. Second, get (the recipient's) attention."

About half of the world's 30 billion daily e-mails are spam, said Fallows, a Pew senior research fellow.

Congress put the first U.S. federal anti-spam law on the books in December, but analysts say much more is needed to stem the scourge, which has caused more than half of those polled to lose confidence in e-mail because they find themselves deleting good messages with the bad.

"People are hopping mad," Fallows said.

Siren songs such as "happy birdwatch" are, to Fallows, "the last gasp from spammers before there's a law people can use against them. They're trying to lock in as many lists of real e-mail addresses and lock in a relationship with people."

Is it working? Who knows, Fallows said?: Try to find one of these guys.

If you have ever opened their mail or, worse, answered it, spammers could be legally protected if they solicit you despite any state or national "do not spam" lists.

"What you are seeing is basically filter-busters," said Neil Schwartzman, publisher of the online journal spamNEWS, and a man who gets between 8,000 and 9,000 unwanted e-mails a month.

Spam filters examine the contents of e-mails and count the number of spammish words. For instance, Schwartzman said, "if I write 'free, free, free, penis, free' I'd rate high with spam filters." So what spammers try to do is to enter random bits of text or blocks or out-of-copyright novels to lower the proportion of trigger words.

"They're trying to get your attention and make you think in some way the mail is legit. You open it up, thinking 'This can't possibly be spam.' "

It didn't take long for people to make art out of the artifice. Neil Carter posts strange phrases from e-mails on his blog, www.livejournal.com/users/djeternaldarkne.

His job has him answering e-mails for a Seattle Internet service provider called Drizzlenet. One day, Carter was deleting spam "like a mad fiend" when his eye caught the phrase "She was no sadist but Amber needed to be hit."

"My first thought was that these were spam-busters. My second thought was that someone needs to collect them. Heck, they read like little stories."

So Carter has been knitting these bits of found language into little dramas. For example:

"She was so malicious to poor little Debbie! Mia made a big clamor.

"I had to contemplate the math about eating dogs for a long time. Amber vainly said she was my idol.

"She said the speech with such conviction I was scared of her. I mimicked Paris when he tried to walk in his scary pants."

To Brooklyn journalist and blogger Clive Thompson, the word salad echoes the literary technique T.S. Eliot used in "The Waste Land" — "essentially an enormous pastiche of phrases, metaphors, lines from and allusions to other pieces of literature and mythology, including many directly quoted lines."

One day, the anti-spammers will figure out a way to adjust their filters so "cheek torpedo sunscreens" is separated from real mail. But until then, the phrases are fodder for those who find beauty in everyday annoyances, who see the poetry in pitches.

A recent work Kristin Thomas assembled on her site (www.sperare.com/spam_poetry/blogger.html) uses only subject lines from e-mails she has received:

"Life just keeps getting better, Susan.

They say you look younger ... like, 136 cups of pure pleasure — the season's finest."