This afternoon, I have been receiving messages—eight as of now—whose subject line contains three random letters, with another three random letters in the body, and the sender’s address being (three random letters)@yahoo.com. Nothing else. Also, the recipient address show as being different from my own, though the domain (@gmx.de) fits. A quick look in the header also doesn’t reveal anything unusual, though I wouldn’t really know what to look for (of course, my email address appears in the appropriate place there). The names of senders and recipients also don’t seem to follow any obvious pattern.
So, what’s the purpose of this? I mean, there’s no kind of incentive for me to reply, so I don’t even see how this would snoop out active email addresses, beyond maybe not creating delivery failures or somesuch. What’s the use of sending out a couple of random letters?
Maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing: seeing which addresses are still active.
And if each one is completely randomized and the spam catchers aren’t detecting them, over time that sender might score higher in the algorithms than spam that’s flagged right away. (As in: “Hmm, this sender is now sending a bunch of emails that are kind of similar, but I’m not sure if they’re spam. But oh, a month ago they sent out 10,000 emails and only 100 of them were flagged as spam so maybe we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt this time”.
Might there be hidden single-pixel images in the messages? That used to be a popular way to track whether an address was live, though I don’t know if it’s still done.
I think the standard setting of most mail programs is now to ask before downloading pictures due to this trick, no? At any rate, looking at the source doesn’t show any image-type content; the entire body of the mail seems to be just those three random characters. Whoever they are, they’re tenacious, by the way, I’ve gotten five more of these over night…
Yeah, that’s why I’m not sure how common it is any more. Though there might still be a few spammers out there who are counting on people still using old clients, or unwise settings.
Another possibility, of course, is that the spam-sending program is buggy, and isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.
When I actually open obvious spam and see something like that, I figure it’s just a test run of the harvested email addys or the mass emailing program.
I have a Spam question. I keep getting that long rambling message from “Adriana” telling me all about her “webcam”. :rolleyes: The address in the “From” line looks like a random string of letters @ a random string of letters - no domain name or anything, but in the “To” line there’s some poor bastard’s e-mail address that has obviously been hacked.