Sorry to take y'all back almost a week, away from the Schiavo & Green Nazi meltdowns, but I got a copy of this spam today and I've figured out the scam. What your e-mail reader doesn't see is that the spammer has inserted the Unicode character which means "switch text directions" every few digraphs. So the text actually looks like this:
> D#8238;rae#8236; Barcla#8238;sy#8236; M#8238;ebme#8236;r,
> Th#8238;si#8236; e#8238;am#8236;il was s#8238;tne#8236; by the Barclays
> se#8238;vr#8236;er to ve#8238;ir#8236;fy y#8238;ruo#8236; em#8238;ia#8236;l
Your e-mail reader, like mine, doesn't interpret the character "correctly", so the text comes out jumbled. But when I copied and pasted the text into a Unicode-aware application (in my case, logjam on Linux) it appeared normal; however, if you place the text-insertion character in between the "a" and the "e" of the first word and try typing, it all comes out right-to-left, a la Hebrew or Arabic.
I bet you that the default e-mail reader distributed by a giant monopolistic software company *does* interpret those characters correctly, so to people reading the spam with that program, it *looks* unjumbled.
And, in any case, the swapped letters are a pretty clever way to get the e-mail through any intervening spam filters ...
-- John S Costello joxn.costello at gmail.com "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." -- J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs