At least once or twice a week I receive mystery emails that are completely blank - the “From” address is blank, there’s no subject line and no message body. The only info that shows up is the time the email was sent, and the message size (always only 1kb). I’m confused as to what’s up with this. There are no attachments, so I’m guessing that rules out a virus (I’ve got a Mac anyway, so I’m not worried about that), and no message, so I suppose that rules out spam. Nobody’s told me their emails don’t get through to me.
I had a rash of these a few months ago. I was getting 10-15 every day for a couple of weeks. It was generally agreed it was spammers pinging email addresses.
It is probably spammers. A lot of spam is sent by people who are not all that technical with software that is pretty sketchy. These messages are probably someone screwing up the settings and sending 100 million blank messages.
Could be someone screwing up. A couple of other possibilities also spring to mind.
The spammer could just be looking for you to open the e-mail. When you do, they get confirmation that you opened it, and put your e-mail on a list of known good addresses, which they sell.
The e-mail could also contain a hidden image (like a 1 x 1 pixel white dot that blends in with the white background of the e-mail). Your e-mail program loads the image from the spammer’s web site, and the spammer gets confirmation that your e-mail address is valid. Then they sell your address, same as above.
I have my e-mail viewer set to show HTML source rather than display the HTML itself, and I get a lot of messages that are really and truly blank, as well as many that have just enough HTML to be valid, but no image or other “call home” links. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that looks blank but actually has a callback (your mileage may vary) – usually the one-pixel image ones are hidden in innocuous text.
Bleah, hit submit too soon. What I was getting at is: mere receipt of an e-mail isn’t enough for the sender to know it was received, and many (most, maybe all?) of these don’t have either a call-back link or a return-receipt.
I generally get “recipient unknown” e-mails when I, say, mistype an e-mail address. Could it be likely that spammers flag as a live address every one that doesn’t bounce back somehow? Or do ISPs and such generally use catch-all accounts to eat these e-mails without giving notification of non-receipt to the sender?
I think that it varies. I hope most are starting to not send bounce messages because at lot of spammers are not using their own address in the from section of the email. This means the the bounce message is going to some innocent third party.
Depends on your email program and how you have it set.
I have mine set to display any images that are actually embedded as part of the email (no back-ping), but not to display any images that are just references that need to be loaded from a Web server somewhere.
Not only do my emails load faster, but spammers don’t get confirmation that I’ve received their messages.
As for the OP, I think there’s plenty of evidence for stupidity on the part of spammers, Amazon Floozy Goddess. I frequently get spams where the subject line is “Subject line” or the first line reads, “Are you looking for hot stock picks, (recipient name)?”
Nobody who seems to really know is talking, but a Google search will show that at least one virus has spread this way: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/31/bagle_downloader/
…and that in the past, lots of spam filtering programs would crash and shut off if they encountered a totally-blank email message, unflagging all the email in that session as not-spam. Most won’t do that now, but they still needed special features added just to be able to flag blank emails as spam. Many Windows email clients/spam filters have the problem, and even some on Mac do too.
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The process you’re describing simply isn’t worth the effort to spammers. It may have been 5 years ago or so, but now they don’t care if an address is valid. They are dealing with spamming lists millions of addresses long, many of which are semi-random guesses. They only take a couple of hours to send (often on someone else’s computer), and they don’t bounce back their way, so why should they care if 50% are invalid? As long as they reach the 0.001% that are the idiots who respond to spam.
Besides, is there anyone really so stupid to take a spammer’s word that they have validated their spam address list and buy it off them? Spammers are liars, everyone knows that. (Well, everyone apart from the afore-mentioned idiots)
I get these all the time, the blank emails are due to three possible reasons.
Spammers being clueless and can’t configure their spam software correctly.
Spam viruses going wrong and firing out blank emails.
Some Spam/Virus firewalls along the way stripping out the spam or virus within the email before it reaches you.