Creepy Email

Lately I've been getting some creepy email. I don't just mean spam with adult content, but stuff I can't figure out.

I recently added a really strange one to my list of messages that slipped by the filters. It had all the hallmarks of a typical junk email that consciously crafted with spam killers in mind.

It had about 3 kilobytes of "spam poetry" - semi-random jumbles of words designed to fool Bayesian filters. As usual, the message text was hidden using various HTML formatting tricks.

What was strange is that it lacked any content. It appeared to have a valid invisible "tracking" image. It didn't have a "body" image - which is most commonly displayed to the recipient.

It also lacked another item which is almost always present in spam emails. It didn't have a URL. Without a URL, or other contact method, spam doesn't really hold any value for the advertiser.

So what was it? My theory is that someone was doing a test-run, and wanted to determine delivery rates on a certain spam format. It made it right past my anti-spam solution code. Looks like I have some coding to do.

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