On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 05:44:32PM -0400, Ben Okopnik wrote: > On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 05:32:58PM -0400, Sam Densler wrote: > > Ben, > > It makes sense when there is a legitimate product offered for sale in > > the spam email but what about the emails that just have a link with no > > text, or a bunch of nonsense, or I have even seen some with no link at > > all. Just seems like the intent is to piss people off but what is the > > financial gain? > > Oh - yeah, I've seen those as well. I _think_ - not sure, but I suspect > - that they're accidental mailings, kinda like "Dear Rich Bastard". > > http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp > > The thing to remember here is that what the spammers (the people that do > the actual mailings, not the advertisers) get paid for isn't in the > visible part of the email - it's the effort to structure the headers so > that the email appears legitimate and slips through the filters. Most of > that is going to happen before any content is added (thus the empty > emails), or where they just type in some nonsense so there will be > _some_ kind of an email body. > > Like I said, though, that's just an informed guess.
I'd always figured that they were sent out to confuse/poison Bayesian and machine-learning based spam filters. -K -- Kris Coward http://unripe.melon.org/ GPG Fingerprint: 2BF3 957D 310A FEEC 4733 830E 21A4 05C7 1FEB 12B3 _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list Liveaboard@liveaboardonline.com To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to liveaboard-j...@liveaboardonline.com To unsubscribe send an email to liveaboard-le...@liveaboardonline.com The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/liveaboard@liveaboardnow.org The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
