WTF is up with spammers?

[sketerpot]

I recently received this gem of an email:

Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

From: O Boticário <oboticario@oboticario.com.br>
Cc: oboticario@oboticario.com.br
Message-Id: <20060903204940.07923FBA41@wtiger>
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 05:49:40 +0900 (KST)


<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana">Olá Parabéns,</font></p>

<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana">Você ganhou um vale presente

da Boticário no valor de R$75,00. </font></p>

<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana">Você foi contemplado na Promoçao

Respeite Minha Natureza. Alguem pode te-lo inscrito na promoção.</font><font size="2" face="Verdana">(amigo(as),

namorado(a) etc). </font></p>

<p align="left"><font size="2" face="Verdana">Seja bem vindo ao mundo Boticário.</font></p>

<p><font size="2" face="Verdana">Para maiores informações de como

resgatar esse valor nas lojas boticário, e<br>

<br>

para imprimir o seu vale desconto. clique no link abaixo e leia todo regularmento.<br>

<br>

<a href="http://www.oboticario.com.br.g.la/%20"><font size="2">http://www.oboticario.com.br/</font></a></font></p>

What I want to know is, why would a spammer go to the effort of sending out a mass email that isn't even readable by the vast majority of idiots? Are they just too stupid to figure out how to use their own spamming software?

This isn't an isolated incident, either. For example, I occasionally get spams which consist entirely of filter-confusion text taken from Charles Dickens. No commercial spiel, no links, just out-of-context paragraphs of literature. Does anybody see a sinister motive, or are the spammers just idiots?

[aerius]

I've been getting those too. My guess is there's probably some kind of automated spamming script which makes up all the garbage text and then sends it out. All the spammer does is punch in the weblink or whatever into the program and the damn thing does everything else for him.

[sketerpot]

What I want to know is, why would a spammer go to the effort of sending out a mass email that isn't even readable by the vast majority of idiots?

Other than the fact that it is not in English, it would be readable by most, as surely their software will understand the HTML for them. It has links, too, which oh so many idiots will mindlessly click.

Wrong. My email client supports HTML just fine; this wasn't properly formed HTML email.

Now that I look at it, it looks like the spammer just stuck too many newlines before the content-type: text/html declaration. So, yeah, just a dumbass who can't use preview.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

We have also gotten bizarre spam over on Librium Arcana. A spambot was posting actual, somewhat interesting posts in the Testing forum over there. One of them almost started an interesting discussion. If it was not for the exact same thing being double posted, twice in one day and not answering response posts, I would have thought it a human and allowed the IP address to register an account.

On the forum, tricking the admins into allowing the bot to register might have been their motive, a somewhat cunning plan, if better executed, but there is no such motivation in email.

There's a strong possibility that it was an actual human (maybe from India, Russia, Nigeria, or some other country with a huge mass of poor people) paid to try to trick you guys into regging an account for a spambot. Click-fraud is done this way as well.

[Spyder]

Most people reading this forum probably know this already but it bears repeating.

Disable images.

Spam comes in, you read it, some very basic html tries to pull a remote image which verifies that you've received it and registers your account as active.

[Straha]

I can beat that! I got a spam letter that was 3/4s from Augustine's Civitas Dei with a line advertising for porn sites right in the middle.

I was highly amused, especially because it was Augustine who the guy chose.

[Utsanomiko]

I'm rather fond of the useless spam that was going on for months on the Warhammer Wiki, Lexicanum (still may be for all I know). Some random edits would be made on empty, completely useless discussion pages that nobody would ever read (unregistered user profiles, blank subcategories, random number new articles, etc), and every time it would be an invisible long train of links to viagra and mortage websites, every time starting with this text:

Excuse for my post but I do not have money to buy meal to my children. Forgive me please.

I had fun deleting them when I checked by some days. "Stupid vandalism removed." "World's dumbest marketing campaign removed." "Vandalism removed: spam will not by meal to your children." "Pyramid plan removed: get a job." I wonder if they ever decided to take measures to get rid of him, since most edits were done by registered contributors then.