I was sitting around chewing the fat with my brother the other day, discussing the various quantities of spam that we get on a daily basis, and the way that pitches have changed, especially the way that mis-spellings and deliberately inserted lists of gibberish are the current tricks of the trade to bypass filtering mechanisms. Sometimes the result is merely humorous, and other times it's actively working against the spam marketing ethos; I recently got one pitch with the subject line of "Raw Fetus Belgium", and having read that, whatever enthusiasm I may have had for their "G3neRik V1aGrA" completely evaporated.
As we sat and chatted, Harriet entered the room and jumped up onto my lap. Harriet's one of my three cats, and she's a lovely cat in many ways, but she's not very bright at all. In fact, she's incredibly unintelligent to a level where she could very nearly be classified as a dog.
Combining the relative stupidity of Harriet and the problem of eradicating spam, we hit upon a theory that fits most of what's known about the problem with the feline at hand, and decided that Harriet wasn't in fact unintelligent at all; she was simply an open mail relay flooded with billions upon billions of spam messages. It's not an entirely insane theory, if you think about it...
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