Spam with no purpose?

Thu Apr 1 03:36:09 UTC 2004

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 at creative.net.au>	    I emailed Wesley Crusher.