ken dixon

For what seems like years now I've been finding blank emails in my
mailbox. No subject, no sender info, just a blank email addressed to me.
Anyone have a clue what this might be about?
I happens 3-5 times a day and while it's no big problem I am curious.

TIA
Ken in Miami
PS Navy Flake in a Stanwell (volcano?)
Mac user who's not in the slightest computer literate.

christopher p. cericola

< For what seems like years now I've been finding blank emails in my
mailbox. No subject, no sender info, just a blank email addressed to me.
Anyone have a clue what this might be about? I happens 3-5 times a day and
while it's no big problem I am curious. >

Probably mal-formed spam..basically, it's violating the rules of how an
email is supposed to be formed and your mail client is not understanding
it..but it knows something is there. It could be a real message but it's
more than likely spam.

Christopher

ken dixon

Makes sense, Thanks.

Ken in Miami

gs

On 2004-11-19 14:41:23 -0500, Ken Dixon <Kdixon2711@bellsouth.net> said:

There are several theories about what these blank messages are. Some
say they're just screw-ups from spammers, but I don't buy that theory.
I've been seeing more of these, so I think it's more than botched spam
attempts. Maybe it's some kind of "probe" to see which e-mail boxes
accept them and which ones bounce them. I bounce my spam so it
(hopefully) looks like my address is dead to spammers.

BTW, I use and recommend JunkMatcher
(http://junkmatcher.sourceforge.net/Home/index.html). You can use this
add-on if you use Apple's Mail app on OS X.


--
replace "fakeisp.net" with "bellsouth.net"

joe blow

Yeah, JunkMatcher was the only thing I could get to catch these "blanks".
My regular filter always passed them to my inbox.
As for what these blanks are, here's what Benjamin Han, the creator of
JunkMatcher had to say about them:

"Frankly I'm as clueless as you with these blank emails. :-)
But here is the conspiracy theory:

1. Some spammers figured out problems of specific filters/mail clients, and they
wanted to exploit. (Mail prior to 10.3.3 crashed when you mark this kind of
messages "as junk").

2. Probing for bounces, like you said.

3. Misconfigured spam software - you know, they are users too ;-)

4. Somehow skewed the statistics collected by those Bayesian/Latent Semantic
****ysis/Neural Network/etc. filters.

In dealing with spam, we're dealing with anomalies after all..."

That's the closest thing to an answer I've been able to get on these
blanks. Let us know if you find out!