Tech

Grammar for spammers

Several years ago, some friends and I tried to devise the 'ultimate' spam filter. We never hit the perfect solution, but one came close: check incoming messages grammatically and ditch any that don't make the mark. The idea was that most spam was terribly punctuated so would be stopped. Sure, some genuine messages would get caught too, but heck (and see if you can spot the arrogance here) if someone wanted to communicate with us, they'd best use language correctly.

While researching spam for work, I've often come back to this idea. It's a neat lateral solution to the problem. Unfortunately, in recent weeks it seems the spammers have wised up to my idea.

This just in today:

Any polar bear can organize for dolphin, but it takes a real polar bear to grain of sand about corporation. Indeed, clodhopper inside compete with blood clot around particle accelerator. Most tea parties believe that globule near boy ignore bottle of beer toward shadow. If bride defined by befriend cleavage living with sandwich, then dahlia living with ruminates. But they need to remember how often over insurance agent earns frequent flier miles.

I've mentioned 21st century spells before, but now they seem to be constructed from sentence fragments that would fool even my theoretical grammar checker.

Still, it makes reading spam almost enjoyable, and if the trend continues I'm sure I'll one day receive the complete text of Jaberwocky.