If you’re wondering why your e-mail is suddenly filled with messages containing paragraphs of gibberish, Wired magazine has the explanation.
The story quotes Anthony Baxter, one of the developers of SpamBayes, a free, open-source Bayesian antispam filter: “I’d say at least half of the spam that I bother to look at now contains a paragraph or two of random blather. This is yet another escalation of the arms race between spammers and those people who like to have a useful e-mail inbox.”
According to Wired, “The addition of seemingly nonsensical words is aimed at confusing the antispam filters that incorporate Bayesian analysis techniques, such as SpamBayes and SpamAssassin. These filters examine incoming e-mail messages and calculate the probability of it being spam based on each message’s contents.”
Ed Bott 