I’ve received a handful of email messages recently that aren’t exactly normal spam. This includes messages with no body and very few headers, and messages composed of slightly random text with no real attempt to sell anything. Here’s an example:

Hello, handsome! No one ever lost his honor, except he who had it not. Difficult times always create opportunities for you to experience more love in your life.A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk. necessarian unseldom pronationalistic malthas scarfing

I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it’s my face, the way I look. Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.

I can only assume that both of these types of messages are an attempt to screw up Bayesian filtering tables by sneaking borderline words into your pool of non-spam (“ham”) email messages. The idea is that spam filters won’t find anything objectionable in the message, so it won’t mark it as spam, and users will just delete the message without using it to train their filters. I’m not convinced that it’ll work, but it’s a nice try.