Spam Lit

"Spam Lit" (also known as "Lit Spam" and "Literary Spam") is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mails. Some of the snippets are made up, others are passages from public domain works (such as Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible), and others are conglomerations of several creative public domain works, which can often be copied off the web and included in e-mail messages hawking software, male enhancement pills, and computers.

At first, e-mail recipients believed that the mysterious Spam Lit appearing in their inboxes had something to do with "keyword spamming," which is the practice of embedding a list of topics unrelated to the core message and hoping that these topics would land the e-mail into the right demographic mailbox, the idea being that if one hurled enough garbage toward a faraway wall, a bit of it would stick.

Spammers often send one spam message to millions of mailboxes, and if only .1% of the recipients bite, that is still a huge profit. So it would be worth the spammer's time to cobble together a text based on literary texts.

However, Spam Lit exists primarily for a more insidious reason: to circumvent the powerful spam filters developed by Google, Yahoo, AOL, and other e-mail providers, which have been "trained" to recognize the characteristics of typical spam words, such as "click here," "free (product name)," and certain pornographic terms. Spammers have learned to place their target terms in images and unrelated text for the spam filters.

One of three things will happen to an e-mail message: it will land in the recipient's inbox, it will be routed to the recipient's spam folder, or it will be blocked. Spammers want that message to end up in the recipient's inbox, and they have figured out that spam filters look for certain textual patterns, such as overused product references, and evidence of an actual text message.

Thus, in an an attempt to circumvent spam filters, the spammer creates a Spam Lit e-mail, typically consisting of an image (which the spider bots cannot read, at least as of 2007) with the product name, the Spam Lit text, and a link, which directs the recipient to a website or parking page, filled with ads. Often these are hit and run pages, deleted after the spammer has made his or her profit and moved onto other quick profit websites.

Spam Lit seems to have first been coined on September 20, 2002, on Listserv.buffalo.edu [1]. A member of the Poetics listserv first coined the term in a subject line followed by this message: "I'm still thinking about the ramifications of literature and art created with the delete button in mind. Jess (Glass)"

However, e-mail recipients began noticing a spike in Spam Lit in late 2005 and early 2006 and continuing throughout 2007.

In August 2006, David Kestenbaum of NPR's Morning Edition [2] broadcast a story on what he called "Literary Spam."

According to Kestenbaum, Paul Graham, a programmer (and not a spammer), is indirectly responsible for the current Spam Lit dilemma. Graham noticed that spammers were circumventing spam filters by purposely mispelling key words, for example replacing "I" with "1" in the word "click." so, according to Kestenbaum, Graham "wrote a program to find out how to best separate spam from real e-mail. To train it, he fed it a good helping of spam and a separate sample of real e-mail."

Graham discovered that his 50-line code eliminated 99% of his own spam. Soon, however, spammers discovered the works of long-dead poets and writers as yet another way to circumvent Graham's antispam code.

Eventually, more powerful spam filters will be developed to block Spam Lit, but for now, recipients arelikely to continue receiving one or more Spam Lit e-mails per day.

There is something beguiling about Spam Lit; on the one hand, it's an effort to crash a recipient's e-mail addy for nefarious purposes, and, yet, there is a certain elegant and ephemeral quality to the text. Even the "merged" pieces often make some kind of sense. For example, this e-mail recipient recently found this Spam Lit poem in her spam folder:

Palladio who beckons from the other shore, Floating on the sky. The road, but not far enough ahead The road, but not far enough ahead giddy as good kids playing hookey. Now, Late February, and the air's so balmy Wheezing ravens, when Snow haze gleams like sand. Only a whiter absence to my mind, So you can watch me watch uplifted snow Gray the cloud-like oaks XIII. The Route to the North then takes a step back, to be safe as she reaches. grow hot in the parking lot, though they're I've drifted somewhat from the distant heart That square—Oh, 56 x 56 Preface to the 1970 Edition As if your human shape were what the storm XX. To the Pole

Modern poets often refer to Spam Lit as "found" poems and prose and often incorporate these snippets into their own work.

Some recipents look forward to receiving these missives from dangerous strangers whose sole goal is to part potential marks from their money.

While Spam Lit can be amusing to creative spirits, it is annoying and time-consuming for most e-mail users. It is likely that improved spam filters will eventually block it.

(More sources coming)