Someone has sent me an email in English with 'tod doofturb' in it with
a smiley face - what does this mean?

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Request for Question Clarification by joseleon-ga on 11 Aug 2003 05:58 PDT

Hello:
  It's someone you know or it's spam? In which language was the e-mail written?

Regards.

I suspect that these are not words at all, but are just some random
characters that are part of a spam email. Here's some info on why this
is done:

"The 'Fell on My Keyboard' Effect: At the end of spam subject lines
you'll often find a random assemblage of letters that makes it look
the sender face-planted at his or her terminal. 'Pounds Melt Away with
HGH k forktolewl' 'Merida, Xanax, Valium - No Physical Exam Needed
jajesvgcw c' 'ebay insiders club. hundkysga' And so forth.

Those random letters are there to foil spam filters employed by
servers -- if thousands of messages arrive with the same subject line,
Internet-service providers know they can be discarded as spam. Those
random letters are automatically generated for each subject line, and
fool the filters into seeing each message as unique. (A variant of
this trick is used to append characters to the fictitious return
e-mail addresses that underlie spammers' fictitious names, which is
why you can mark a message as spam one day and get the same message
from the same 'person' the next day.)"

http://techlawadvisor.com/spam/2003_05_05_archive.html

I think pinkfreud answered your question....

Translated roughly from German, it's "die stupid turb". Turb may be a
masculinity-derogatory noun, meaning a 'weak man' or 'less of a man',
but I'm not sure.

-- paper