I was just reading an article about the problem and it mentioned something I hadn't noticed…or I guess I had noticed it but I hadn't realized what I was noticing.
I did notice that the spelling in most of the unwanted e-mails I happen to read is generally atrocious. It hadn't dawned on me that this is deliberate in order to fool some kinds of spam-filters. The spammers type "viagara" instead of "viagra" because some filters will instantly label any message containing the latter as spam. I just got an e-mail that spelled "penis" as "penís." The accented "i" gets it past many blocking mechanisms. In other words, the more illiterate a message is, the better its chance of reaching (and therefore, communicating) with someone.
There's something kind of odd and almost poetic about this occurring as our means of contacting one another becomes increasingly high-tech.