[mrtew]

For a month or so I've been getting a lot of totally blank emails. No subject line, no recipient, no sender, no content, no nothing. Are these some kind of spam or virus? Is it a bug in Mail.app?

I get them all the time now and my roommate gets them too. I just don't see the point of sending them. I don't even understand how they send them. If I try to send something totally blank it goes nowhere. WTF is going on with totally blank emails? Does anyone know?

[TheBadgerHunter]

I also get around 10 of these a day. Everyone else I've asked also gets them.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

mee too!

is it from someone bouncing their spam off my mailserver or something? or using my mailserver for something deviant?!

it is f*cking annoying.


by the way, what the f*ck are they going to do about spam? that stupid gay arseed CAN SPAM act is sucking nuts at this point as I dont see anybody even coming close to following it. it's like telling pimps and dealers to stop breaking the law. our government needs to beat them into submission

[ThinkInsane]

I get them also, and as an added bonus, about once a week they appear to originate from my email account. Which is somewhat odd.

[11011001]

I was thinking that they were a method by Spammers to screw up the learning on our filters. But, I don't know.

[Mafia]

they might have been intended to be blank. it could also be a type of email that is not compliant with your mail server. i just remember that a mailing list used to send me emails and they'd come up blank sometimes because the type of email was not allowed through my server. i dunno though that was pretty long ago.

[Mr. Blur]

I get them too. I actually went as far as to send feedback to .mac about it, asking why they can't easily filter these things before they even hit my inbox....seems like it should be simple - no subject, no message body = go no further. All I got in response was their generic "why you got spam" reply.

[Mastrap]

I always thought that they were sent by spammers trying to verify addresses. Does the message contain an invisible image?

[starman]

Same. I started checking these. One came from a .fr domain.

Mike

[spiky_dog]

Originally posted by Mastrap:
I always thought that they were sent by spammers trying to verify addresses. Does the message contain an invisible image?

i receive a bunch that are completely blank. no unloaded or invisible images, no body or headers to speak of (save To and From).

[Kenneth]

count me in.

Junk mail filter: subject is equal to <no subject> sometimes works.

[xi_hyperon]

I get a lot of those on my throw-away yahoo account. My guess is also that it's a crude attempt at address verification, but who knows. They're easy enough to spot and delete.

[mrtew]

I can't believe that nobody knows anything about these emails that everyone gets.

[Curios Meerkat]

Originally posted by Mastrap:
I always thought that they were sent by spammers trying to verify addresses.

That's exactly what they are. It's an attempt to outsmart spam-filters that bounce suspicious emails with generic 550 messages.

[TheBadgerHunter]

Any idea how to get Mail to whack em?

[itistoday]

Originally posted by TheBadgerHunter:
Any idea how to get Mail to whack em?

Yes, just make a rule that checks the body of the message, if it's " " or "" then have it mark it as junk or something.

[JHromadka]

Originally posted by Kenneth:
count me in.

Junk mail filter: subject is equal to <no subject> sometimes works.

Careful with that. I get emails from people all the time who don't use a subject in legitimate mail.

[Chuckit]

Just add an identical rule for Message Content.

[mrtew]

Originally posted by Curios Meerkat:
That's exactly what they are. It's an attempt to outsmart spam-filters that bounce suspicious emails with generic 550 messages.

So if they bounce back then the emails are crossed off the list but if they go thru then they know it's a real address. Or is it the opposite?
And how do they send them without any recipient specified? If it try to send an email with no address it doesn't go out to anyone, but somehow theirs are getting to everybody. How do they do that?

[turtle777]

I won't post here because I never got any of these and I might get infected by being around here so I better not post and be away as soon as possible and forget about anything I read here I hope that helps

Wait ?





Ahhhhhhshshfjkhdkfjhkasjdhfuasdfiubhsdalkgbns;fkjg b

[B Gallagher]

Augh.. yes.. spam. We all get it. Well all hate it.

Although I'm still a PC user for the time being, I partly get around it by, every time I recieve an email, I block either the email address or the domain (unless it's something like yahoo.com). It doesn't work all the time.. but it saves me a couple of spams a day. I don't get much a day anyways. Thankfully.

Also, what someone was saying earlier about spam saying it was coming from their email address reminds me of something my COMP lecturer said to us in 2003 -

"I know that Scott King is not trying to sell me viagra - he's a graphics lecturer."

[Curios Meerkat]

Originally posted by mrtew:
So if they bounce back then the emails are crossed off the list but if they go thru then they know it's a real address.

Yup.

And how do they send them without any recipient specified? If it try to send an email with no address it doesn't go out to anyone, but somehow theirs are getting to everybody. How do they do that?

That is because of the way the SMTP protocol works - here's a real-life example (red is the spammer, blue your ISP's mailserver):


220 innocent mail server OK
helo spammer.net
250 Hello spammer.net, pleased to meet you
mail from: <>
250 2.1.0 <>... Sender ok
rcpt to: <your@email.address>
250 2.1.5 <your@email.address>... Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
.
250 2.0.0 xyz Message accepted for delivery
quit


Mailservers accept messages from the "<>" address - it's the standard used for internal messages (bounces, delivery errors, etc.) and it should not be filtered.

Put pressure on your ISP to deploy (better) mail filters, and forward all junk mail (with full headers!) to abuse@yourisp.com

[mrtew]

Originally posted by Curios Meerkat:
220 innocent mail server OK
helo spammer.net
250 Hello spammer.net, pleased to meet you
mail from: <>
250 2.1.0 <>... Sender ok
rcpt to: <your@email.address>
250 2.1.5 <your@email.address>... Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
.
250 2.0.0 xyz Message accepted for delivery
quit

Thanks for trying to explain that but I understaned even less now! Wanna try that again in english instead of computer code? I'd really like to know and you're the only one who seems to know so far!

And if it's a test for email addresses why don't they just go ahead and send the spam instead of a totally blank email?

[Curios Meerkat]

Just ignore that part then, I was just trying to show how easy it is to send such an email, and that it needs less than 350 bytes of traffic.

The people sending such emails are not necessarily involved in sending you spam - they are 'email-harvesting', either for the spammer or they simply compile big lists of thousands, or up to millions, email addresses that are sold to spammers. It's much more efficient to send spam when you have a list of working addresses than to try sending a complete email without knowing if the recipient exists, for instance when you're bulk-mailing to thousands of addresses.