New Kind of Spam 'Un-Training' Filters?

Zaphod2016 writes to tell us the Wall Street Journal is reporting that email in-boxes are under a new kind of spam attack. This new spam has confused many people due to its lack of advertising, viruses, or request for personal information. One popular theory is that these innocuous blocks of text, often drawn from popular literature, are being used to "un-train" spam filters to allow more malicious spam through in the future.

Comments

Other way around?

[Sepodati]

Wouldn't it work the other way around? I still flag crap like this as spam, so it seems like it'd train my spam filter to have more false positives, no?

---John Holmes...

I buy the "broken spamware" angle

[nuzak]

The WSJ article also gives due time to the theory that the spamware is simply broken and that the spam payload is being delivered with the padding and not the payload. Since I've previously seen plenty of Gutenspam (my name for this spam that contains snips from Gutenberg texts) with an image payload attached, I'm definitely leaning toward the notion that they slipped somewhere and are now not delivering the image.

Woe betide literature discussion groups now that filters are trained on the classics.

Probably something far less ingeneous.

[OwlWhacker]

I have seen quite a number of corrupt e-mails coming from spammers. Occasionally you find the subject is merely %%SUBJECT%%, or an e-mail has entered your system consisting of just the headers and no body.

My theory is that there are more people attempting to use spamming applications, and many of these people don't have a clue what they're doing. You'll probably find that they've forgotten to add their text to the e-mails, or are just not reading the documentation on how to successfully send their spam.