Spam with no purpose?

Thu Apr 1 03:31:00 UTC 2004

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 22:18:03 -0500 Deepak Jain <deepak at ai.net> 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..

> For example:

> From: Joe Legitimate <jlegit at university.edu>
> To: Deepak Jain <deepak at ai.net>
> Subject: [dictionary word]

> [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] 
> [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] 
> [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] 
> [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] 
> [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word] [dictionary word]

> --- EOM ---

> I don't understand why one would waste the time, if its a test, why 
> would it get out in public?

> I would like to think I am being naive, but I just don't see the upside 
> unless it were particularly targeted at me or my mailserver to determine 
> our response or response time, etc.

just out of curiosity, do you happen to use a mail reader which normally
only shows you the text portion of a mime message?

there's quite a lot of spam which has attempts at busting bayesian
filters in the text section, and the spam payload is in the html section.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
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