[extropy-chat] Webpanto

[Don Dartfield]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, scerir wrote:

> I receive, every day, mails like that below. Is there some hidden/random
> meaning? Or it is just a robot playing? A new transnational joke?
> Crosswords? Webpanto? s.

It's the latest irritating twist that spammers have taken.  Usually there
is an attachment or other second part to the message that contains the
actual commercial part of the message; the plain text portion filled with
random dictionary words is intended to help the message slip past
statistical spam filters (i.e., Bayesian filters), which, as I understand
it, basically compare a message's "good" features to its "bad" features to
judge whether or not it is spam (what exactly constitutes "good" and "bad"
will vary from product to product, but usually things like links to
external web pages and the like are judged to be bad, while plain text
with real dictionary words -- and not words like "V1a.gra!!!" -- are
good.).  Hopefully the spammers are staying a step behind the filters...