In my oreillynet blog today, I call for people to stop working on content-based spam filtering, since it's an unwinnable arms race. As an example, I got a spam today that led off with:

.,        ,; .R,
@FS      fUD jos
 DN      Gw,
 Fzw    OUn  hdx  DLdknFf:   qgOKPugU  aYkIda  @ygoaQr
  Dj    hN   Sam  xb    tJ. mBT.  fSV  zek    Nw;   @Hf
  dxd  Stk   ALQ    TZFwKw: qR     ol  HJb      EmpiiA@
   sb .Vz    XWw  chY:: Aw, ju     iA  GFk    aHs,c woi
   FsrQua    Gcc pW     kA  IBy   HFd  ZVx   Gsx    SME
    ziyA     riA  UNvhcHbgj  NZaBdunU  TYA    NsaQfMzrRB
              ,    ,:;U   :        Ae   ,       ,;w   .:
                            lze   yrP
                              IegDp.
[download]

Since that's filled with obvious non-words, I demonstrated how easy it would be to replace those with words or names.

open( my $fh, '/usr/share/dict/propernames' ) or die $!;
while (<$fh>) {
    chomp;
    push( @{$words{length($_)}}, $_ );
}

while (<DATA>) {
    s/(\S+)/replace($1)/ge;
    print;
}

sub replace {
    my $list = $words{length $_[0]} or return $_[0];
    return $list->[rand @$list];
}

__DATA__
.,        ,; .r,
@ln      qly tlg
 nq      aq,
 Brg    iaB  WiW  iqpbduk:   ifcciWvj  Wypdip  @rnoqqS
  lc    st   unx  mm    su. Wyl.  eee  daa    jb;   @kS
  kjt  smp   WkW    8hytct: ih     xd  WiZ      Zlantc@
   tg .vk    WrW  cyW:: hy, vx     bo  WnW    gtx,i 0rW
   SnjsaS    WbW gw     oo  kkZ   rto  WeW   fvB    0qZ
    xbcd     ocg  tfrotxynk  veqWhurb  kdy    wavkuseax0
              ,    ,:;i   :        yr   ,       ,;i   .:
                            Zjc   ugr
                              btfau.
[download]

which when run gives:

Ti        Po Kaj
Tao      Wes Art
 Al      Ian
 Jem    Tao  Raj  Caroline   Jeanette  Harold  Bradley
  Al    Ji   Stu  Ro    Hon Axel  Kaj  Tim    Sam   Stu
  Lee  Tad   Raj    Phiroze Ed     Ro  Lin      Shankar
   Hy Lex    Ric  Barry Van No     Ji  Jim    Jerry Ram
   Sorrel    Luc Ji     Ji  Kaj   Van  Mah   Fay    Art
    Hohn     Ami  Krzysztof  Jennifer  Jan    Novorolsky
              ,    Saul   :        Ed   ,       Per   Ro
                            Rob   Bob
                              Amedeo
[download]

Of course, you can use any list of words you like: /usr/share/dict/propernames just gives nicer results than /usr/share/dict/words did for this example.