[ale] [OT] weird spam

[ale at FultonGreen.com (Fulton Green)]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 03:47:44PM -0500, Kevin Krumwiede wrote:
> I've been getting some weird spam lately.  Apparently, the spammer has
> resorted to quoting English literature to get the messages through spam
> filters.
> 
> What's weird is that there is no payload evident -- no HTML, no
> attachments, no sneaky MIME stuff.  Just random, mysterious passages.
> 
> Anybody else seeing this?

Well, /. had an article today on how spam was now being used as a covert
communications channel, so perhaps you're looking at steganography in
action.

Or, it could just be a test for the spam trojan on a newly-infected host.

Seems like one of the Russian spammers was including a three-word snippet
randomly selected from one particular highbrow tome.  Wired had an
article on it a few months back.