“Swaziland bodice debutante.”
The words rise from the computer screen and turn into a question mark that sinks itself into the corner of the reader’s mouth. Hooked.
The e-mail, once opened, is nothing like advertised. It’s an ad for a home mortgage. Seduced by word salad.
With a full-scale assault now raging 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 allow a peek at the body of an e-mail without actually opening it.
Most times, when you click open the mail, the accidental poetry is gone–and in its place is a solicitation. Duped by digital disappearing ink.
Spammers also have turned to prose to get read–verbatim excerpts from novels and public-domain classics such as “Alice in Wonderland” and “Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.”
“It’s just another trick,” said Deborah Fallows, author of a Pew 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. About half of the world’s 30 billion daily e-mails are spam, said Fallows, a senior research fellow at the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Congress put the first federal anti-spam law on the books in December, but analysts say much more is needed to stop the Internet scourge.
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.”
“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 determine 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 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.’ “
One’s spam is someone else’s poetry
It didn’t take long for people to try to make art out of spammers’ artifice.
– Neil Carter, who answers e-mails for Seattle Internet service provider Drizzlenet, posts strange phrases from e-mails on his blog, www.livejournal.com/users/djeternaldarkne.
Carter began knitting together bits from the spam he was deleting 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.”
– A recent work that Kristin Thomas assembled on her Web site (www.sperare.com/spam(underscore)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.”–KRT.
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Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and Ben Delery (bdelery@tribune.com)
