From http://www.pcuser.com
An answer to a question that has been bugging me:
What's with the nonsense email that's been flooding my inbox lately?
Subject : corsage hickeyContent: If paper napkin about maestro a big fan of eggplant beyond demon, then football team of turkey takes a coffee break.And find subtle faults with the dark side of her cleavage.And trade baseball cards with the dark side of her midwife.umbrella from mourn grand piano beyond.fuse sauerkraut anvil macro allah dupe implicant dido What's that all about?

Chak Khong, Epping, NSW
This is what I call Spammerwocky. These gibberish e-mails appear as if Lewis Carroll had turned his hand to penning spam, but unfortunately the result is nowhere near as entertaining as his famous poem, Jabberwocky.No wonder you're confused. After all, it's one thing to get a spam whose subject reads "Get your FR3e V-Y-@-G-R-@", quite another to get a message which consists entirely of nonsense. The former is clearly an attempt to evade simple spam filters that search for trigger words and phrases. But what can the latter hope to achieve?If you take a close look at one of those spammerwockies you'll probably find an image or a one-line sales pitch lurking within. Maybe one or two of the words contain hyperlinks. That's what the spammer hopes you'll spot (and respond to, either deliberately or accidentally). And it's what the spammer hopes your spam-blocking software will fail to spot. (If there are no links whatsoever, the spammer may merely be sending out a test mail to see whether it reaches a legitimate address.)All the rest of the message -- the nonsense words and phrases -- is an attempt to fool both simple pattern-matching filters and the far more sophisticated Bayesian filters. Bayesian filters look for spam-like subjects, words and phrases and balance those spam indicators with 'anti-spam' indicators in the same message. This holistic approach judges each e-mail in its entirety, instead of simply blocking on the basis of trigger words. The spammerwocky tries to sneak through the filter by burying its core message within an apparently 'benign' context.The technique works -- sometimes -- but only when the content of the spam is so thoroughly disguised it almost makes no sense to send it. Still, some people click on links in this type of spam, and that's enough to keep the spammers' hopes alive. If you're one of those people, you are, unfortunately, part of the spam problem, as your actions are helping keeping spammers hopes and businesses alive.Rose Vines

With some nonsense emails, if you open it and wait, it will launch an html email with an ad for something (viagra, mortgages, etc.)

Lately I have also been getting a lot of totally blank emails... no content, no return. ?? they are presumed to be tests by spammers to confirm an address

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