[CS-FSLUG] Dumb spam

[Tim Young]

Sorry to break the news.

Often that sort of spam is a test.  With intelligent spam catchers these 
days, they do a lot of tests to see what sorts of things gets through 
the various spam catchers.  Also, it does things like telling the 
spammers if your account is active.  For example, if I were to send an 
email to fred at nodomain.org, I would get something back that says, 
Fred at nodomain.org, user unknown.  Then if I were to send your email 
account a stray mail message, it would not say "user unknown."

So what you are seeing is a form of random polling.  Most of them do not 
automatically check in, but some of them have embedded URLs that they 
can track when the email is opened.  But most of those are now caught 
with spam-catchers. 

    - Tim Young

Nathan T. wrote:

>I've seen more than my share of spam mail that didn't say anything
>understandable, it was just a mess of random letters.
>
>I'm curious what, aside from being another piece of garbage floating
>around the internet, that spam serves, it really isn't advertising
>anything that I know of.
>
>The only thing that comes to mind is that MS Lookout and Lookout
>express have some sort of functionality built in that informs the
>sender when the message has been opened, but the user is prompted
>first and it shouldn't work on any other mail client.
>
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