• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, July 13, 2006

Spammers have proven themselves fairly proficient at staying one step ahead of the technology and filters meant to foil them.

Now, it appears they've developed yet another tactic to get spam past filters--at least going by some of the spam I receive. (OK, I'm too curious and tend to open all e-mail, even the obvious spam.)

Recently, random bits of prose from JRR Tolkien have been included in the messages. This morning, a message with the subject line, "calih VleAGRA," included a passage from "The Hobbit." It read, "the hobbit that was lost. That only makes eleven (plus one mislaid) and not fourteen, unless wizards count differently to other people. But now please get on with the tale. Beorn did not show it more than he could."

Yesterday, a similar e-mail came, but with a few sentences from another Tolkien book.

A search this morning on the phrase "hobbit spam" revealed that it apparently rolled out in May, on a limited basis. Some of the first bloggers to write about the tactic predicted it would grow more widespread in the future since, apparently, passage from books can trick a number of spam filters.

For now, anyway. Eventually, of course, the Internet service providers will catch on to this strategy; in the meantime, expect to become expert at identifying random Tolkien prose.

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