Spamming Turing

One of the reasons I love Larry Kagan's art is for its origin: the shadows were originally a problem he sought to eradicate instead of a feature to take advantage of. What if we apply this idea to spam email? What could it possibly be good for?

If we look at the problem on a document-level, there is the potential for communicating relevant information in the form of spam. But we already know this doesn't work: nothing is relevant to everyone with an email address (much less to everyone in your address book, as some people have proven to me with their cute animals/national anthem/animated gif forwards).

On the other hand, if we look at it on a larger structural-level, we see something more interesting: at least half a billion email addresses receiving spam, most of which have some sort of spam filter in place (this is a guess based in the popularity of Yahoo! mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.). Content-based spam filters are, in a sense, fitness functions for the human-ness of a message. What's more, when an email gets past a spam filter, you get a real live human to decide whether its legitimate or not.

Ignoring any ethical dilemmas, I propose a learning system that makes an attempt to "reach out" to others via email, revising its attempts based on the clicks each different email receives (of course, there would be a URL in the message). I predict it will derive a shorter version of the Nigerian email scam, or something with the same theme ("I'm in need of trouble and need a response").