I just had to share this

A spam message managed to slip through gmail's filters today. The first line reads:

"It is time to end the anguish of the length of ur thing."

Oh, the anguish!

-=the serious part starts here=-

Spam and the software that's built against it is an amazing arms race. The few ads that get past my filters are those without a single word that could could identify them as such. In the past, spammers used misspellings like 'ob ese' or 'V1agra P1lls' but the current generation of filters are built to learn those.

I clicked on the link (with a completely innocuous-looking URL, that they likely have to change constantly), and there weren't even any red-flag words on the page. The ad was just a large image. So even if the spam filters read the links contained in the mail, they wouldn't catch this one. I wonder how long until they install character recognition software to catch words contained in image ads like this one.

Wars are the greatest stimulators of technological advance and this is nothing short of a war to save email. What's next, an AI that can read and understand English to tell when a message is wanted or not? That's a pretty hard challenge, especially considering the grammar contained in these spams.