Spam Lit
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
Spam lit (also known as lit spam and literary spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are original content, others are passages or conglomerations from public-domain works. Spam lit is included in spam emails selling or purporting to sell a products such as software, male enhancement pills, and computers.
Contents
Usage
Spam lit exists to circumvent the powerful spam filters developed by major email providers. These spam filters recognize the characteristics of typical spam messages and automatically delete them. The sender may include an image (which the spam bots cannot detect) with the product name, the spam lit text, and a link, which directs the recipient to the spammer's choice of website.[citation needed]
History and reactions
The term was coined by a member of the Poetics listserv in 2002. [1] A spike in spam lit began in late 2005 and continued throughout 2007.[citation needed]
A book entitled 'Spam: E-mail Inspired Poems' by Ben Myers was published in 2008 by Blackheath Books. Myers claims to have been writing spam poems since circa 1999.
In August 2006, David Kestenbaum of NPR's Morning Edition broadcast a story on "Literary Spam".[2] Kestenbaum notes that Paul Graham, a programmer, "wrote a program to find out how to best separate spam from real e-mail. To train it, he fed it a good helping of spam and a separate sample of real e-mail." Soon, spammers discovered the works of long-dead poets and writers as one way to circumvent Graham's anti-spam code.
Literary uses of spam lit
Spam lit has been referred to as "Found poetry" and prose and snippets have been incorporated into literary works. Popular Twitter spambot @Horse_ebooks has been described as "a specific type of authored non-authorship with roots in chance operation procedures and instutitional subversion."[3] In 2014, NYC literary magazine Twenty-Four Hours published a long poem called You Are My Anti-Spam Hero as the first installment in their Anonymous Chapbook Series.[citation needed]
