== Minimalistic spam, another annoyance to worry about

I've started getting advance fee fraud spam which have as their entire
contents something like this:

> You won Three Million Pounds.contact Anita Meyer : *<email address
> elided>*

At first I was amused by the minimalism and lack of effort on the
spammer's part; it'd be hard to get an advance fee fraud attempt in less
words. But the more I think about it, the more that I think this may be
more clever than it looks (whether or not it's deliberate).

Modern anti-spam filters are quite good at analyzing text and detecting
signs of spam. But tiny, minimal messages like this give them a problem
(and indeed this one passed the spam filters with a low score), because
there's almost no text for anti-spam tools to sink their teeth into. The
less text there is for textual analysis, the more you're going to
have to rely on some sort of meaning analysis, which [[has problems
SpamFuture]].

(I am relatively convinced of the existence of a general trend of giving
anti-spam tools less text to work on. I've been seeing spam where the
real payload was a PDF or _.doc_ file for a while; I presume this is
done because it (currently) hides the spam text from anti-spam content
analysis.)

This text still has markers that could sort of be matched on, and
probably a pure Bayesian approach would work well (since there's a
number of words in there that probably don't normally appear in your
email). But I'm not convinced that either will hold up in the long term;
smarter spammers can eliminate the obvious markers, and probably there's
a lot of room for rephrasing the message and using a less distinct set
of words.