The Spamalyzer Gets Her Own Site
The Spamalyzer hard at work.
Assuming that there must be something wrong with the people who send spam, I opened a free advice column for spammers a few years ago. I am not qualified to give such advice myself, but fortunately, the Spamalyzer is.
The Spamalyzer is a slightly customized version of the well-known Eliza psychoanalytical conversation robot; above all, the script that the robot follows is specially crafted to generate reasonable responses (or at least comical non sequitur) to phrases likely to appear in spam messages. I set it up so that a few of the hundreds of spam messages I receive every day are passed to the Spamalyzer (we are of course unable to help everyone). Every couple of days, I then post her best responses to the advice column, which recently moved from a page here to a site all its own at DearSpamalyzer.com.
Yes, this is silly, but entertaining at times, if you are so inclined. On a more useful note, I am working on software to collect some statistics on the spam I receive. I don't mean quantitative statistics — there's plenty of that already — but rather qualitative statistics, like the "spamminess" of words and phrases and other forms of linguistic analysis. Things like this can be used in rule-based spam filters, like SpamAssassin and its ilk. I'll post them here and on DearSpamalyzer.com as they become available.