[TAG] Question: Purpose of some spam messages?

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello,

I was just wondering if someone has thought about what is the purpose
of SPAM messages which only contain some mish-mash text. The
qualifying criteria are:
	1. Only text without attachments.
	2. Text that contains incoherent sentences or disconnected
	   sentences. [*]
	3. Definitely messages from addresses not known to the
	   recipient.
(The last is to exclude e-mail messages written by friends who are
not quite sober at the time of writing :-)).

Here are some possiblities that occured to me.

A. These are messages that are designed to test/mar the efficiency of
the spam detection systems currently employed by servers.

B. These messages contain coded messages that are flooded across the
internet in an attempt to disguise their true origin/destination. The
real message could be short one such as "the machine from which this
has been sent has serious security holes".

C. This is generated for someone's research project.

D. This is the result of some spam generating software/virus which has
   bugs.

I don't know if this is worth wondering about ... except ... why is someone
going to some trouble to make (a program which is making) life difficult
for everyone?

Pointers to prior discussion welcome.

Thanks and regards,

Kapil.
[*] Clearly (2) is subjective which makes such spam hard to detect
automatically.
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