So I've been getting this spam poetry for a while, and I've only now gotten the idea of where it comes from.

It turns out that due to increasingly sophisticated spam filtering software spam marketers are required to think up more and more creative ways of getting spam past the filter and into your inbox. Spam filters rely partially on keywords to parse out spam messages - for example a message containing the word "viagra" and very few other non-spam words would be certain to go to your spam filter.

To get past these obnoxious roadblocks, spammers moved to image based spam - embedding their message into an icon that a spam filter wouldn't be able to read.

But then the images started getting blocked.

Now they accompany the image with some ambiguous text, best left up to English PhDs and Milton scholars to interpret.

According to Zeek:
"The reason spam is couched in nonsense-text has to do with statistical methods devised by the 18th century English theologian-mathematician Thomas Bayes. Bayesian filters rank each word in an email according to how likely it is to be spam. If the email contains a high number of non-spam words, it can elude such filters."

So now we've gotten to the point where it's impossible to tell the art apart from the sales pitch. Who is writing what we are reading? A computer? And more importantly who is buying what they're selling? We may now be at the point where spam poetry has transcended the sales pitch and is an art form in and of itself. When marketers realize it isn't working, and the subsequent crackdown on spam art happens, will there be a La Boheme-esque art riot in the virtual street? Time will tell.

Labels: poem, poetry, spam, spam poetry