Random Acts of Spamness

"Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...."

This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters.

By throwing a hundred or so random words rarely used in sales spiels into each e-mail missive, spammers hope to thwart Bayesian filters by making the spam appear to be personal correspondence.

The strange strings of words, which usually appear at the bottom of spam and sometimes in the subject line, are automatically added by spammers' mass-mailer software, according to Steve Linford of Spamhaus, an antispam advocacy organization.

"This random noise is technically known as a 'hash buster,'" Linford explained. "Hashing" is a technique used by some spam filters to quickly compare incoming mail to known spam.