Spam Poetry
Spoetry or Spoems
Recently, a writer received the following message and asked me if I thought it was message sent from another poet, a potential peer. In other words, was the message sent legitimately, albeit a little clumsily since they did not know the name of the sender.
—— Forwarded Message
From: Mitchell Alvarez <blackbirdQx@yourdictionary.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:44:48 -0300
To: [deleted]
is heir to now they look abroad to see, underneath this tree; where lions
roam.
manhatten island swept clean in sixteen seconds and i must seek for mine,
was my uttermost west, and could thrill from the library door, but has gone
astray
—— End of Forwarded Message
The sender’s email address was sufficient to indicate to me that it was spam. I responded that I was pretty certain that the sender was fictitious. I advised the recipient to treat it like spam: do not respond and to delete it and not waste their time figuring it out.
I thought I would use it as an example of what spammers do to draw the attention of receivers to pass on malware. The message content is more than somewhat poetic. It is composed of various lines of poetry from a number of different poems and sounds like quite good poetry since the lines are from very well known poets as you will see from the following reference table that, in its creation, became for me, an interesting poetic puzzle.
| Poetic Line | Poem | Poet |
| is heir to | Hamlet | Shakespeare |
| Now they look abroad to see, | Dream | William Blake |
| Underneath this tree; | The Little Girl Lost | William Blake |
| where lions roam. | The Marriage of Heaven and Hell | William Blake |
| manhatten island swept clean in sixteen seconds | Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning | Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
| And I must seek for mine. | Night | William Blake |
| Was my uttermost West, and could thrill | Twenty Years | Bret Harte |
| From the library door, but has gone astray | A Newport Romance | Bret Harte |
A question many ask me is “why are there spammers”? I typically respond, “That is like asking a policeman why there are criminals.” In general, spammers are malcontents—up to no good and are in the business of spreading havoc.
What every computer user must be concerned with is that spam obfuscates malware in order to steal your identity information (usernames/passwords) and will exploit the very avenues that a user uses to access the Internet to hijack your computer so that they can hide the source of their activity. Don’t help them by being interested in what they are doing. My rule of thumb is to focus on your own work, on the people that you do know. Know your network well enough that you will know when the words that they present are not their own by their choice of words, their style, their degree of seriousness. If something they appear to have sent sounds odd, it is likely they did not send it. If an interesting message is sent to you from someone that you don’t know, it is likely they will preface it with, “I got your name from … “. Their reference will make sense if the message is legitimate.
When something seems a little off, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone to check it out.
If you are concerned about being drawn in, strongly consider setting your email program to translate messages to text to prevent inadvertently running malware that can be hidden within a formatted message. All mail that gets sent to me is changed to plain text.
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