A few times a month, I get spam e-mails that are mostly just a bunch of filter-confusing jumbled words. They might mention viagra, or something… but there’s not a link, or a website they want me to visit, or anything.
So even if I were interested in increasing the size of my dick to farm animal mauling length, there’s no way to actually buy anything from them. They’re just a bunch of garbage.
What’s the story behind these? Some sort of error by the person making the spam, or is there some sort of point to these?
The email was designed to be viewed with a browser/email client other than what you were using, making it seem invisible. Did you try viewing the full source?
The email might’ve had an invisible image or two used as “web bugs” – basically, the moment you open the email, your email client loads the image, letting their server know that your address is valid. Then your verified-active email address can be used later or sold to other spammers.
They were trying to mess up the accuracy of spam filtering programs that “learn”. One (convoluted) example: They could put a bunch of innocent words into an email they hope will be classified as spam; once your spam filtering program catches the email, the innocent words will be added to its list of “bad” words. Then, in the future, valid email containing those words might be mis-classified as spam. If this happens often enough, you’ll not be able to trust your spam filter. Then you might turn it off and it’ll be that much easier for their spam to get to you.
Here’s my WAG. Some mailers (not the one I use) are capable of sending an email back to the sender that the mail was opened. For a potential spammer, that is information of value.
At this point, I open email only if I know the sender or if the subject line looks like something addressed to me specifically. This stuff is neither.
I’d go with your “error by the the spammer” hypothesis.
There are applications out there for generating spam. In order to use such packages, you have to have a modicum of intelligence, which eliminates (by definition) most spammers. So, if you forget to enter your URL for “ch3ap v1agra” in the pertinent box in the application, you end up sending out millions of spams without your URL in them.
I saw a hilarious example of such a screw-up a couple weeks ago. The spammer had somehow not entered the parameters right for their spam run, so the spam email still had the “variable names” from the script. It was something like this (literally):
Dear %recipient%
%greeting%
Ref1nance your mortgage online!
For as little as %amount% you can get a new home loan!
Keep in mind that there might be hidden viruses in innocent or ineffective looking spam. Sometimes merely opening the email can trigger the virus. If your anti-virus protection doesn’t catch it (or you don’t have any a/v protection) then it can sit hidden on your system for weeks or even months before it launches an attack. Your machine can then become a zombie and you become a spammer (or virus spreader)…
The more alarming posts in this thread (from dolphinboy in particular) are all predicated upon your email client being able and willing to render HTML and execute embedded scripts in any email message it opens. This is not unlike soliciting for drugs onstage at a punk concert and swallowing any pills the audience members decide to throw your way: You could get a really neat trip, but the odds are better that you’ll end up sick, dead, or zombified.
Configure your email client to ignore HTML and not execute attachments and these problems go away.