Empty Emails. Or Not?
Okay. What is the deal now. And am I the only one-- getting emails from fictious senders with plausible sounding names who send an email in which there is no content and the subject is a random assortment of 10 or so letters? I've had a dozen in the past two days and this is getting old!
Should we suspect that somebody is testing our email address validity with a spam bomb to come our way at some future date? Postini does not catch these and I don't know how it could.
I right click these messages and shift-delete them. But I still have this uneasy feeling the deleted messages are even now gathering in some dark corner of my hard drive, donning their camoflage and blackening their wicked faces and assembling strange-looking weapons, soon to swim through my *.doc files looking for something to eat.
What are you doing about these mystery emails? Should we do anything other than delete them immediately? Should I alert my nearest T.I.P. snitch?
Comments
Yes, I'm getting them, and shift/deleting. Junk in the cyber world seems to have gone from bad to much worse in the past week. I had to find and download a new popup blocker: a sudden onslaught started 3 days ago. Couldn't even write a short e-mail message without these things obliterating the screen faster than I could close them. STOPzilla is holding them at bay now (has blocked 403! since I installed it). But I wonder, is it something I inadvertently did that opened the floodgates, or is something new going on out there?
Posted by: Lin B | October 27, 2003 7:52 AM
I too have noticed an increase in Spam, and I am getting the empty messages too. The random letters are designed to fool the baysian spam blocker programs like Popfile. I wonder if maybe the spammer just screwed up and didn't merge the content properly? These guys aren't exactly rocket scientists you know! I block all HTML in email, so I tend to get a lot of empty emails anyway.
I'm very close to going to a challenge-response system, where all email will be considered spam and blocked unless it is from somebody on my white list, or the sender answers the challenge email to prove they are human and get themselves on my white list so their emails will be delivered in the future.
Posted by: Chris | October 27, 2003 9:45 AM
I use a software found at: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/, which plugs in to Outlook 2000 - directs spam into a seperate folder quite well. However, the best solution is to obfuscate your e-mail - http://www.manastungare.com/asp/preventspam.asp to prevent robots picking it up off your web page. They say this is not fool proof, but i have used it on my recent weblog and a spammer has yet to find this address. Unfortunately i did not do this on another of my sites and now I receive about 40 spam mails a day!
Posted by: Philip | October 27, 2003 11:11 AM
You need to setup filters with a white list for the people you know (friends, family, the bank, etc.) the rest goes into a folder that empties at a gievn interval or whatever criteria you choose. Then check the kill file every few days to make sure something you need hasn't gone into the kill folder.
Deleting them is pointless. FILTER.
Posted by: feste | October 27, 2003 9:09 PM
Oh...forgot...the google toolbar blocks pop-ups and it's free (choose the non-reporting option). Doesn't address Gator or data-miners...but catches most of the annoying pop-ups. You should have AdAware too...I find the paid version is better... but the freebie does a pretty good job.
Posted by: feste | October 27, 2003 9:14 PM