Hi- The blank messages are "pings" used by the spammers to scrub their lists. This practice has been around for a long time. With postal mail, direct mailers want return service so they can remove bad names from their lists, same with spammers, since having a huge number of undeliverables slows things down and means that the spammers' customers aren't reaching the number of people they wanted to.
While there are all sorts of ways to reduce spam, one of my clients has been using junkfilter (http://sourceforge.net/projects/junkfilter/) - a free set of procmail recipes - for several months now and isn't getting these messages. -Russ At 08:58 AM 5/14/2002, Dassa wrote: >|> -----Original Message----- >|> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >|> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Charles Daminato >|> Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 10:40 PM >|> To: Swerve; opensrs discuss >|> Subject: RE: SPAM? >|> >|> >|> Ya know, I'm getting a tonne. But as soon as I see that everything's >coming >|> from Taiwan or China I give up... getting an admin to respond to an >email, >|> let alone DO something about it has proven (for me) to be virtually >|> impossible. Best of luck :) > >Same here. Been about 30 of those Julia test ones so far today on just >one email account. Set up to go directly to /dev/null now. > >Curious about exactly what they are trying to do though. Stupid thing >to do and doesn't seem to have any valid reason behind it. > >Darryl (Dassa) Lynch. > >PS...using the word test in the subject line will most likely mean any >mail to my addresses will slide away.
