You Don't Say...

[gnomi]

So here, verbatim, is the text of spam I just got:

Hello,
And... oh, no marrer! Much obliged to ye, Old Wolf - faithfulThese bullocks were handed over to those of the company whoBlood escorted him to the entrance ladder at the foot of whichproposed that the Arabella and her prize should return to Tortugawhich he was master.no more.assure you I am calm. I am asking you a question, Lord Julian.You're so very hot, now! The doctor linked his arm through Peter's.severe in character.THE SERVICE OF KING WILLIAMBlood. Yesterday I had his own explanation of that tale of Levasseurrefitted for sea on the other, Captain Blood was pondering the riddleto line the bulwarks and view the great stately vessels that weremarry her.girl?Nuttall.

Huh?

A couple of snippets of it I can understand:

-- "No marrer." Not a problem; Passover was months ago.
-- "These bullocks were handed over" -- clearly a reference to some korban (sacrifice brought in the Temple. See Leviticus.) or other

But the rest of it? Completely flummoxing.

Comments

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Two posts down on my f-list, there is mention of the novel Captain Blood by Raphael Sabatini. Wondering if some of this text might be from that?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Could be. I am frequently amused by the random strings of words that spammers will use to get their mail delivered.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

But what were they trying to sell you, or get you to do? If this was just some random phrases strung together and emailed, with no intention of persuading you to do anything, I don't think it counts as spam. Unless the point is merely to annoy people. Or perhaps it's a test run for future profit-seeking spam.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Who knows. I sometimes wonder if it's just to see if they've got legitimate addresses and see which ones bounce.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I will often see similar gibberish if I read spam while in the UNIX shell, but if I download it the gibberish is gone and only the "official" message remains. I've always assumed it's a way around spam filters. Maybe in this case, the person was particularly incompetent, and forgot to put in the actual spam?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

This was how it read in Webmail, but when it downloaded into Eudora, it was an ad for prescriptions over the Internet (I'd kept it instead of deleting to see what it became when it downloaded).

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK. Sounds about right. (Those are much more fun behind the scenes!)