I keep getting a bunch of blank e-mails in my inbox. Usually sent by someone with a feminine username like “tara34” or “leeann”. When the first one came, I was going to reply, but then I thought this might be some underhanded technique by spammers to see if my e-mail address is active. Every time I get one I check the message source and there’s nothing, no subject or message text. Does this happen to anyone else or am I on the receiving end of some bizarre blank e-mail conspiracy?
Well, I haven’t seen such myself, although there’s always a first time.
You don’t mention what service or mail reader program. If the e-mails’ origin is from the Internet (in which case the sending address ought to be something like “tara34@babe.com”), you might check the message headers to see if the “Received” lines are suspicious (like a relay from Bulgaria via a host in Vanuatu, neither of which is “babe.com”). If you’re talking about, e.g. internal AOL mail, then I’m afraid that I have no suggestions to offer.
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
My WAG would be that your e-mail address is very similar to something that Tara and Leeann ARE interested in, something like, “If you’d like to sign up for our mailing list/cookbook/coupon-sorting box/information about vacations in the British Virgin Islands/blah blah blah, send us your e-mail address”.
Or maybe it IS a conspiracy. Got any disgruntled ex-wives marshalling all their female friends to flood your e-mail?
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
To be fair, there are e-mail programs which display the sender’s name and not their e-mail address. I use Outlook Express and it works that way; I don’t see the e-mail address unless I ask to see it.
As for the blank e-mails, I have gotten them as well. I suspect it is someone fishing for active e-mail addresses. They spam a mail server with every name they can think of with a blank message. Some few people will respond to the message with a “what is this” type reply and the spammer then sends them gobs of e-mail or sells the address to others. They might even be able to evade some anti-spam rules that way since the users in question did technically e-mail them asking for information. (Not that that seems to matter to most spammers in the first place, but…)
“Sometimes I think the web is just a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.” — Dilbert
My guess would be that it is some list provider that buys mailing list and re-sells them as larger list. They are probably verifying that the e-mail address is valid before paying for it.
Sounds like you may be about to get a whole lot’s of free e-mail.
They usually come from free online e-mail services like Hotmail or Yahoo, but a few had regional ISP domains. I guess they use female names figuring men will be more likely to reply if they believe the sender is a girl.
Maybe you are getting HTML messages, they look blank but are read by a browser.
Why would you want to read email from people you don’t know anyway?
I have a website, sometimes people send me comments on it or such. My mail program is Outlook, which supports HTML. Anymore I’m in the practice of just blocking the sender and deleting them. I was just wondering if this was a widespread thing, because I had talked to one of my friends, who spends more time online than me and he’d never heard of it.
I’ve gotten empty emails in March, too.
No women’s names.
One said from: reston.security@ bvs.com
One said from: emd050227@mail.gwd50.k12.sc.us
and a couple of others I tossed before I realized this was a new phenomenon.
I must say it had me spooked- It seemed the only point was to find out if my email address was valid, so I felt it was an omen that I would soon be on a million chain-letter/multi-level marketing/spam lists.
I’d tried to reach them and the webmasters but got invalid-name/domain messages back. So I know they aren’t honest sites I’ve signed up with lately.
I’d forgotten about them in this past month-until your post. Now I’ve gotten a new email address, and plan to stock water and c-rations in case they can somehow find me again. THEY WON’T SPAM ME ALIVE!
Chief Crunch-
One thing you should do on your website is to convert the html mailto: reference so it doesn’t look like one. There are tools at download sites for this (sorry-I’ve forgotten the names). Basically what they do is substitute ascii % notations for your email name. The mail still gets to you, but the evil web crawlers aren’t trained to pick it up. The thing I’ve done is put my email name in a gif image so it can be read visually only (not recommended for selling from the site, as it cuts into impulse mail).
Be brave. 
Good luck.
Just located the tool for encrypting your mailto: name
MailTo-Encryptor v1.1
(found it on ZDnet Downloads under search of “mailto” - there are several others)
http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/info.html?fcode=0011RP
I’ve gotten them too, if that helps. (Didn’t think so. Oh well.)
And they are a new thing. I’d guess in the past a spam-list checker would send an ad with the test since it was going out anyway.
The only reason I can see that they’re now so short is that a spammer has to get a lot of address testing done in a short time, since the webmaster will soon shut him down.
Using any trick to “obscure” the content of your mailto: URL is at best a defensive measure. If a computer can decipher it at all, then the spam will go through. It’s better to take spammers and a nail gun, and, placing their head firmly on the ta-- er, I mean, it’s better to have good filters in place. At least, until after the revolution comes.
One simple way to build an effective spam filter (but see below) is to filter on the To: and Cc: lines, and approve anything that is specifically to you or an approved address (a mailing list, for instance). Then take anything that is from an approved email address (like a mailing list that rewrites headers) and keep it. Put everything else in a junk mailbox that you almost never check.
Pro: 99% of spam is sent with BCC, and once you’ve built your exception list, you’ll experience incredibly few false positives. (I usually get one a month, and that’s because I haven’t bothered to add a few aliases yet that get nigh on one message a month when it’s busy.)
Con: 99% of junk email forwards that promise lower gas prices, vacations in Florida, free cell phones, and justice for nonexistent 4-year-olds aren’t BCC’ed. For those, I recommend www.snopes.com and much more patience than I ever manage to have. And, of course, sometimes a spammer will stupidly send mail directly to me, in which case I send off the usual spam complaints so as to Darwinically educate them that getting through my filters gets their accounts yanked.
(There are even better ways to cut down on spam, also, but unless you’re the person running your mail server you probably won’t be able to use 'em.)