I keep getting spam mail on quack cures for baldness and get-rich-quick schemes.
When I look at the “full header”, my ISP is nowhere listed.
Usually these are “TO:” the sender himself, but the sender is a fake address that I cannot reply to- I get failures back saying not recognized.
The latest one doesn’t even have any “TO:” line !
So how does anyone in the string who handled it know where it’s supposed to go at all?
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean nothing’s there. There are ways to hide e-mail recipient information.
Note that the information in the message header (the part you see) doesn’t really have to be valid. SMTP, the protocol used to send email, has a command to specify the recipients of the message, whose body includes the headers you see. Normally the content of the SMTP recipient command doesn’t really show up in the message header, at least in a way most email clients can see.
For example, I can create a message with a To: header of cecil@straightdope.com, and tell my SMTP server to send the message to edzotti@straightdope.com. With most email clients (e.g. Eudora, Outlook), you can do this by specifying recipients in the Bcc field (bcc stands for blind carbon copy, i.e., someone who receives the message without the other recipients knowing). The BCC recipient field won’t show up in any of the recipients’ copies of the message.
I use Outlook Express and filter everything. If my name is not in the header it is not even downloaded. That gets rid of 90% of spam
If you want to help stop the spammers check out http://spamcop.net