»Slang King Nr. 2

SPAM filters are failing against the latest round of randomly-generated Subject: headers.

Some recent favourites:

"cyclades manic repairman motherland"
"portage operating ineducable magnitude"
it's like poetry.
"imprompty amnesia falcon"
"explicable bullet scold"
AND:
radian frescoes bobcat
alsatian expositor (sounds like a Fall song)
fascinate pontiff antipasto ineradicable coalition

but "magneto snoshage links" was from aram :-)

February 5, 2004 UPDATE:
The New York Times has a nice article on this phenomenon in today's Circuits section

Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam
By LISA NAPOLI

PURPOSES L. XYLOPHONIST sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality.

There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. The fact that his name appeared in the return line of a piece of unsolicited e-mail almost assures that he is not.

Mr. Xylophonist wrote trying to sell some pamphlet about maximizing profits on eBay. Or maybe that was what Beiderbecke P. Sawhorse was pitching. It was definitely not the one from Marylou Bowling; she wrote to tell about "Government Free Cash Grant Programs." Then again, that might have been from Elfrieda Billman. As for Usefully T. Medicaids and Boggs Darrin, they both wrote about cheap drug sales, no prescription needed. (Of course.)

Alongside those missives from friends and that drudgery from the office is a cast of e-mail characters with fantastic names promising all manner of stuff for sale. Frequently the promises are bogus; virtually all of the names are, too.

Though it seems impossible to imagine the unwanted e-mail known as spam as anything but a nuisance, there is something creative about these return addresses - even if they are being used for untoward purposes. On Web bulletin boards, they are sometimes draw admiring observations.

"I like a lot of the names I see on spam e-mails because they're completely abstract, with little conception of culture or traditional sounds," said a posting by someone using the name Oissubke, a self-described fiction writer. "They jump out. They're memorable. They may not work for Grisham or Shakespeare, but they're ideal for my own writing style."

When it comes to making names up, August Kleimo, whose name is just unusual enough that it might have been invented, knows that the best source material is reality.

Mr. Kleimo, a Web designer in the Venice section of Los Angeles, said he was trolling at the Census Bureau's Web site a few years ago and found "tons of free data," including all the last names from the census of 1990. There was also information on which of those names were most popular.

This inspired Mr. Kleimo in a way only a computer aficionado could be inspired: he wrote a random-name generator that spits out pairings (www.kleimo.com /random/name.cfm). Site visitors can adjust the obscurity factor depending on how bizarre they would like the names served up to be (Alberta Trotman being one of the common sort, and Buck Charbonnel and Erasmo Pehowich exemplifying the "totally obscure" category).

Now in its third year, the site attracts about 3,000 visitors a day, Mr. Kleimo said. Some are just people looking to amuse themselves, but others have a more directed purpose.

"I noticed a lot of people were linking to the page who ran fantasy games, linking to it for their character names," Mr. Kleimo said.

But not everyone who visits uses his invention for harmless fun. "I've always suspected that people use it for spam," he said.

That he may unwittingly be contributing to one of the great modern scourges does not disturb Mr. Kleimo, whose business creates companion Web sites for television infomercials, among other things. "If people want to use it that way," he said, "it doesn't really bother me."

To be sure, many of the common software programs for spammers include random-name generation in any case.

And Mr. Kleimo's is not the only random-name generator on the Web: dozens can be sampled there. Mike Campbell, for example, an amateur etymologist and software developer in Victoria, British Columbia, built Behind the Name (www .behindthename.com/random.html), which allows visitors to generate names in various languages, from Icelandic to classical Greek.

Chris Pound, who works in the information technology department at Rice University in Houston, has written more than 40 random generators, including what he calls an "amazing verbal kung-fu" generator, as well as one that merges names from the worlds of Harry Potter and of Dickens (www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound).

"As a kid, I was a fan of the novels of M. A. R. Barker, who is a linguistic anthropologist," said Mr. Pound, whose Web site offers the code he uses to create his generators. "He, like J. R. R. Tolkien, had invented languages for all of the empires in his fantasy novels. It becomes a hobby after a while when you notice things you can turn into a name generator."

But for spammers, name generators can be the bones of the business.

Wildly unusual invented proper names are designed to attract your attention. Less inventive names are chosen to lead you to think the mail might just be real, and to open it. But aside from seizing the recipient's attention, spammers use random names because they are more likely to trick the anti-spammers, including Internet service providers.

"Spammers use software to randomly generate lots of unique names because they know it reduces the chance of their spam being filtered by I.S.P.'s or blocked by users," said Jason Catlett, founder of the Junkbusters Corporation, a company dedicated to the elimination of unwanted solicitations. "Thousands of people a day must hit 'refuse mail from this sender' when they get e-mail claiming to be from Mrs. Marriam Abacha, a favorite of Nigerian scammers. So she has become less common, and spammers know that if they choose any one fixed name they will be similarly treated."

Instead, Mr. Catlett says, they now choose random combinations of first and last names, "the software equivalent of putting a Chinese lunch menu on a dartboard."

Several years ago, spam filters began to catch on to the trend of using sender names that are a combination of letters and numbers, said Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer of the ePrivacy Group, which makes a filter called SpamSquelcher.

Randomly generated names are more likely to squeeze through so-called Bayesian filters, which keep track of common words used in spam, like Viagra, and weed them out. A human may detect a randomly generated name as a fake, Mr. Everett-Church said, but "a filter can't really see the irony of Tupperware J. Smithington."

During our phone conversation, he received an e-mail message from one Kentucky V. Clockwise, who was promoting low-cost Viagra. (The words "Saddam Hussein" were in the subject line.) A few hours later Mr. Everett-Church forwarded a missive from Offense C. Teats promising an electronic greeting card - although the crux of that message, too, concerned performance-enhancing drugs. Despite the use of various filters on his various accounts, Mr. Everett-Church said, spam still ekes through.

Everyone who fights spam concedes the difficulty of outsmarting the generators. "There is essentially a war going on between the spammers and the anti-spammers, and the spammers are always one step ahead," said Stu Sjouwerman, chief operating officer of Sunbelt Software, creator of the spam filter iHateSpam. Random-name generators are just "one of the weapons they use in this battle to get their e-mail first through the filters and then opened up," Mr. Sjouwerman said.

During a telephone interview, an e-mail from an Elly Havewinkel landed in his in-box, asking "if I would please call because I've been the lucky man - I've won a million euros, congratulations."
"It seems to be a genuine business letter," said Mr. Sjouwerman, who clearly knew it was not.

Which is why human users ultimately have the leg up on random name generators, said David J. Farber, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an Internet pioneer. And also why, he said, e-mail is clearly a fallible technology on which people may need to become less reliant.

"I strongly suggest to people right now if they want to get hold of me, here's my cellphone," Mr. Farber said. "Myself and others have found getting your phone book back up to date is getting more important." Of course, what action he will take if he starts receiving voice mail from Purposes L. Xylophonist is an entirely different issue.

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