I have received several emails over the past couple of years like the following:
Subject: wihyn j35c
Body: yt
Does anyone know what these people are trying to accomplish? I assume it’s probably some kind of trojan control or something along those lines, but was wondering if anyone had any further info.
Checking to see if your e-mail address is live.
Why do they want to know that? If they are spammers, why don’t they just send their spam to my address without checking?
Maybe the people doing the checking aren’t the ones who send spam. They could be the ones who sell email lists to spammers.
I hadn’t thought of that - thanks!
It most likely is a mistake. Buggy software used by people who don’t do much testing to make sure they are doing things right.
Or email sent in a foreign language font, which your computer is displaying as English characters, thus producing ‘weird’ emails. (But those would tend to be longer, like a real email.)
Any chance those emails came through a web-based contact form?
If so: they’re testing the contact form.
wkilm.00
If your email client is set up to read HTML automatically what it does is send a link and the email client reads the HTML and displays it. This allows the sender to see if they email is valid as they can check the website logs.
This is one more reason why you should always disable HTML in emails.
That horse is long out of the barn. Too many people send email in html format for most people to turn it off.