Plain Wierd Email...

[SnakeEyes]

I have a lot of email accounts. I don't now why, I can't even remember the reason I gave myself when I opened half of them.

But one of my Yahoo! accounts in particular gets a lot of junk mail. Usually I just delete it and carry on with my day.

But one day I received a message from the Bank of Scotland telling me they had an urgent security update and needed to confirm my details.

I laughed this off, partly because I pay heed to the warnings of such scams, but mostly because I'm not even a customer of the Bank of Scotland. ::wacko So I deleted it without even looking at it.

Now, after a few of these came through, "from" various banks, I decided to look at one for a laugh. And there it was, no highlightable text, just text in an image which appeared to be hyperlinked to some javascript or other.

All this I was expecting. But, at the bottom of the email, was a blank space that was not occupied by the image.

So I highlighted it, to find a passage, badly translated and/or transcripted with a googol of grammatical errors, from a story.

Stephen King's Misery to be precise. ::confused

I looked at the other messages, and each one had a different passage. Each passage started midway through a sentence, and ended with a single word which was so apparently random each time, I'm assuming it was a display name of some sort.

These passages don't even follow on from each other. They appeared to be randomly selected.

Although, I understand what I'm about to say is unlikely as the last word was never repeated twice, what if this spam was being used as communication? ::unsure

What if each passage, or even the last word meant something to somebody who received the spam but knew where to look?

Muahaha... I have the beginings of my own conspiracy theory. Now I'm pleased with myself. ::biggrin

Cheers,

SnakeEyes

[Edit] I've collected over 31 of these passages, and still can't make any sense of them...

[Alex Green]

It's a way Spam uses to fool anti-Span software. Really good anti-spam software checks the message contents and does some complex math thing based on word content to figure out how likely it is that it is spam.

You have so many because the same Spammer is using them (i.e. a lot of your Spam is coming from one guy).

[phoenix]

The more you know! ::biggrin

[BlueNinja]

And on a completely unrelated note,

Space Corps Directive #349

Any officer found to have been slaughtered and replaced by a

shape-changing chameleonic life form shall forfeit all pension rights.

I find it hard to believe that paying out pensions to dopplegangers is really such a great problem. I mean, it can't happen all that often, right? (Not the doppleganger part, that I believe happens all the time, but rather the double surviving long enough to draw a pension.)

[phoenix]

::blink What?

[BlueNinja]

::blink What?

Apparently somebody has signatures turned off. ::sly

[SnakeEyes]

Oh you had to go ruin it for me. *sulks*

Seriously though, cheers for that explanation ::thumbup1 . I figured it was probably from the same spammer (or group there of). Still find it wierd that it's from Stephen King's Misery. Because it's appropriate perhaps?

Oh and BlueNinja, don't try to explain the Space Corps Directives, they'll just make your head hurt. Still want to know more about the one involving a rabbi and a chicken.

(You do know it's Red Dwarf right? If you didn't then I'll stop here before I go into various obscure references.)

Cheers,

SnakeEyes

[BlueNinja]

(You do know it's Red Dwarf right? If you didn't then I'll stop here before I go into various obscure references.)

Sorry, no, I'm not familiar with Red Dwarf beyond the name. Although ...

Space Corps Directive #997

Work done by an officers doppleganger in a parallel universe

cannot be claimed as overtime.

I should incorporate this as a rule in my Trans-D game. ::cool