Spammers picking up a taste for classics

Posted by: Stephen Baker on October 08, 2005

The latest spam I opened includes snippets of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to sneak past the spam filter:

Mrs. Crupp, who had been incessantly smiling to express…sweet Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns… I shook hands with Mr. Peggotty, and passed into the kitchen, while…

Just imagine trying to explain to Dickens how his work is being used in the 21st century. “You see, their bots crawl through the Internet and harvest lines of your work, which they generate randomly…” He might respond: Couldn’t those…’bots’ at least quote entire paragraphs?

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