[Spambayes] More "spam of the future" lately?

[Tim Peters]

[Ryan Malayter]
> I've been getting a lot more "spam of the future" these last few days.
> Paul Graham predicted that improved filters would eventually force
> spammers into such tactics, near the bottom of his seminal article:
> http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html.
>
> The messages consist of basically nonsensical English sentences with a
> link.

I doubt Paul would agree that's what he was predicting <wink>.  Chatty "just
folks" spam is more along his lines, not reams of nonsense.

> The problem is, all of these seem to be slipping by my trained
> SpamBayes, scoring 10% or less.

Why?  Look at the spam clues.  There has to be something decidely hammy
about them to score that low, and a collection of random words isn't
decidedly hammy except by accident.  There must be more to it.  If they're
managing to hit something *systematically* hammy for you, then continued
training will make whatever that is stop looking hammy to you.

> Even domains and URLs change in every message, so SpamBayes hasn't
> really been able to pin them down yet, despite my training on each one.

I've been seeing a fair number of these lately too, and some end up Unsure
for me.  I don't care unless it persists, though:  any spammer who thinks
his goal is evading filters is a spammer who won't stay in business long.
His real goal has to be selling product, and I expect that including random
sentences has to decrease response rate significantly.  I look at one of
these and can't imagine being tempted to respond, because the author appears
illiterate and incompetent simply *because* the message contains so much
nonsense.  Why would I buy anything from someone that lame?

Spam goes thru fads, like everything else, and I *expect* this one to
self-destruct due to its own ineffectiveness at selling product.  I could be
wrong, of course, but I'm probably not <wink>.