Hi folks,
A client whose mail is routed through our SIMS server (we host his domain, but he picks it up at his local dialup's mail server) has been complaining about blank emails that he suspects are spammers' attempts to deliver something small to confirm the address' existence so they can pound him with spam later.
The suspect emails have no subject, no body, no From line (at least in when he downloads them in Outlook). Just plain blank.
I set SIMS to store his mail so I could examine it for myself. The three message headers below were pulled from his mailbox via MailSiphon. They are the entire message.
I later downloaded all the mail with Eudora, and none of the three below even show up in my mailboxes (though they may have been filtered to trash, as I forgot to empty it before doing this and I don't want to wade through 400 msgs to find 'em).
So, the questions are:
1) Is this some sort of new trick by spammers?
Yep. It's the ultra-secret high-tech trick known as "badly broken spamware screwup." If you use the CBL, fewer of these will be delivered. Note that the addresses used by the ones you included are all in the CBL at this moment.
2) is there any way to deal with it using SIMS?
Not really. Use the CBL (or Spamhaus' version known as the XBL) and you will reject some of these. If you are lucky enough to be low on spammers' lists and the CBL detector traps get reliably hit before you, you may see almost none. I only see these delivered to whitehole addresses.
3) Is it even something to worry about?
No.
4) Does Eudora have enough smarts to look at this, see that they're incomplete messages, and just send a delete message to the server? (client uses Outlook, by the way).
Eudora can detect these with a filter, and mark them for deletion on next mail check after moving them to the trash, but it has no immediate deletion action available to its filters. Functionally, the combination of marking the message read, marking it for deletion on next POP run, and moving it to the Trash is probably good enough for most users.
--
Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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