What's the fjmdj about? I can't see what effect it has on the title from an autofilter perspective (other than that it'll be unrecognized) and only spam has that kind of thing in the title, so it makes it easier for me to delete it.

That's a good question, Andrew.
jwz theorized in one of violentbloom's recent threads that the random strings are specifically designed to defeat statistical analysis (learning spam filter such as SpamBayes). From what I know of Bayesian mail and news filters and statistical learning from text, I would think this would have minimal effect, and hand-edited procmail rules would have these trimmed off anyway.

On the MacRumors forum, there is a thread about random filler and random strings at the ends of subject lines (message titles) in spam:


Most of the cases, it's an identification code. If you reply and keep the subject, they will know the address worked even if you reply from another account.
Rule #1: Don't reply to Spam at all.


My personal hypotheses are that:
1. spammers would not bother to track via ident codes, though they do record reply sender addresses, or tag them as active
2. random gibberish is, as this poster wrote on the SpamBayes mailing list at Python.org, designed to confound fully-automated filters that use exact string matching

To paraphrase Helen Keller, although the world is full of spam, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

--
Banazir

...I wonder if it's an encryption key.
Interesting speculation, Denise. Upon reflection, though, I think it's very unlikely because:

1. the keys are so variable in length (and so short overall)
2. if they really were for encryption, they would bother to use numerals and capital letters

Coded messages? Or just the stuff that the monkeys produce on their way to duplicating the Bard's works?
Monkeys, fedinately monkeys. And successful ones, too.
It takes a lot of noise to throw off Bayesian filters.

Spink of the deViol! Loonk wot I just gont:

----- Original Message -----
From: Hammer Rosetta
To: bhsu@bwaha.wouldnt.yew.liek.my.address.spammers.die.trask.brun
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2003 12:55 AM
Subject: Re: %RND_UC_CHAR[2-8], the fear somewhat


--
Banazir

It's eViol to the extreem.
Indead.

There I was expecting to get a great deal of choklit cow's blood, and it turns out to be stoopid milk. Damn spammers!
LOL, I'm afraid the life expectancy of a cow with CHOKLIT bloond in the presence of TEUNCs is considerably less than that of the Goose Who Laid The Golden Eggs in the presence of Dwarves. Most likely we'd lal become skeetervamps, and that's a fact.

--
Banazir

My spammers are still stuck on trying to persuade me to add three inches to my penis.
*brain cannot reconcile the image of Eliza Bennett with this declaration*

I know wot you mean.
It's an artifact of the economics of spam, which I'll write about some time in the coming week.

As this article from The Register explains:

[Canadian telco Telus researcher Andrew] Leung argues that spam makes economic sense, despite miniscule response rates, because spam can be sent at "virtually no cost to spammers". Spam, unlike conventional junk mail, is growing exponentially because it costs virtually nothing to send and all the costs of dealing with spam are dumped on its recipients.

"Electronic email is not at economic equilibrium, primarily because the cost of sending spam is more or less non-existent in the online world. It costs spammers almost nothing to send their material," Leung writes.

Leung reckons response rates to bulk commercial email is less than 0.005 per cent. That means that a typical email message appeals to 50 people and annoys 999,950. Brightmail chief exec Enrique Salem recently told El Reg that scammers only need one in a million respondents to phishing emails to make the con worthwhile.

Hence, men aslo get breast enlargement offers. It is evidently more cost-effective for spammers to completely ignore demographics and content, and abrogate targeted marketing, than to consider whether unsolicited commercial mass e-mail is relevant to any subset of the recipients.

But none of them have ever been able to spell anyhow (they're worse than the worst of my students by a considerable margin, and that's saying something).

They are als0 d3l1b3rately misspell1ng th1ngs n0w, though, just to def33t B@yesian spam f1l7ers. I find it quite heinous, actually.

--
Banazir

Eliza Bennett is my smiling icon, you see.
Yes, I see - nice!

Of course some of the misspellings are deliberate, absolutely. They use diacritics to defeat filters too. I got this one today: "Makë It Lâst All Night!........... " The misspellings in the messages, though, are not (no, I don't read them except by accident!).
We who are familiar with måny a Scåndinäviän cønspiråcy find this vert amuzzling as well as annozzling.

It's appalling. I call on karma to balance the scales for those who produce spam, ultimately. Perhaps they will all spend their next lives as dungbeetles?
How about the afterlife where everyday they sit at 72 consoles and read:


Make more ¥£€ in Gehennom ثشغمک٨
Spämmer, reâch møre reåders אשױקצ


--
Banazir

Oh, that's an even better idea - Dante would approve!
Spammers are ataleast dwon in the Malebolge with the pimps.
Personally, I'd make a level 7.5 for "traitors to bandwidth". :-P

--
Banazir

I don't liek spam!
Yeah! Cllo!

Unmless it has free tencooos.
Even so, eww!

--
Banazir

This, of course, misses the point. The idea should be to find the optimal level of spam that best balances the economic interets advanced by the propogation of spam against the economic side-effects created by over-propogation of spam. The question of whether someone "likes" spam is totally irrelevant. What we actually need is a market for spam.