A message like this will usualy contain an html portion with an image in it that is a single pixel in size, that is white-on-white. It doesn't show up when you look at it, but it sends a request to the sender's specified website to get the pixel, thus showing them which email accounts are active. Jerry -------Original Message------- From: Adrian Chadd Date: 03/31/04 22:58:29 To: Deepak Jain Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Spam with no purpose? On Wed, Mar 31, 2004, Deepak Jain wrote:
Can someone explain to me (publicly or privately) why someone would send spam with no product to sell, no position to pitch, nothing except text designed to get by a spam filter -- without even HTML to KNOW it got by a spam filter..
(a) kill bayesian filters - people would simply mark it as spam and then notice that their spam filters become less trustworthy. (b) list scraping - perhaps not random dictionary words (i've seen real-sounding meeting confirmation emails, for example, which a few unrelated friends of mine also received) to determine which email addresses are/aren't valid (c) Sometimes, I get spam with the above crap in the text body, but a spam-like HTML body. Adrian -- Adrian Chadd I'm only a fanboy if <adrian@creative.net.au> I emailed Wesley Crusher.