Spam mail. Frustrating, time-wasting and utterly pointless. Right? Not if you’re a member of a fast-growing new literary movement. Proponents of this new artform call their oeuvre ‘spam lit’, ‘spam poetry’ or just plain ‘spoetry’, and comb their junk mail folders for tidbits of text to turn into literature.

If you’ve ever received spam mail (which you probably have – around 90 billion bulk messages are sent every day) you’ve probably noticed the unusual and often poetic paragraphs of text at the end of messages. They read something like this:

Hand hath planted, and the branch that thou madest at the
time of year when i visited the factory, arrow, the highsouled
ruler of the madras, addressing following her,

These paragraphs are spammers’ attempts to fool the junk filters imposed by mail providers. You’ve probably seen junk email with titles like V1agra, Via’gra or Vi@graa - this is another method spammers use to get around text recognition. Junk filters are programmed to recognise common spam words like viagra and hoodia, so the spammers change characters so the word is unrecognisable by anti-spam filters but legible to the human eye.

The text paragraphs that spam-lit writers love are evidence of a more complex filter-evading practise. Spammers use a bot to randomly generate short paragraphs, getting their material from the dissociated press (an algorithm for creating text from other text) or the digital web archive Project Gutenberg. Others feed passages from old Bibles through a program, hoping that the archaic language will slip through the filters.

The Spam Literature movement owes much to the willingness of creative souls to see art in the most bizarre of places, or perhaps a quaint desire to turn even the most frustrating banality into something worth reading. It’s definitely worth a look.

Be part of the Spam Lit movement at SpamStories