[69251] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Spam with no purpose?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jerry Eyers)
Thu Apr 1 08:30:37 2004
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 08:28:31 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
From: "Jerry Eyers" <jeyers@sloancc.net>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Reply-To: "Jerry Eyers" <jeyers@sloancc.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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.
