Blank Spam

[Keithj]

In the last few days, a fair proportion of the Held Mail in my mailbox has been completely blank - no "From" or "Subject" or message body. I'm baffled - if I tell Spamcop to forward these to me, nothing arrives. If I Spamcop them, they produce a blank line in the report.

Is it just me, or is there a glitch somewhere?

[Wazoo]

Have you tried re-routing your e-mail to take the SpamCop servers out of the equation? You provided no data for any of "us" to guess at how your e-mail gets to the Held folder (and JT seems pretty well otherwise occupied these day)

So if SpamCop is POPing your account somewhere else, stop it for a day so you can look at those e-mails yourself. If your other account if Forwarding to your SpamCop account, shut that Forwarding down for a day, again, so you can see what's showing up there.

This response is based on the fact that you say "the last few days" .. but there isn't a great chorus out there with others making the same complaint. So it's either something happening with the transactions of getting your e-mail to the SpamCop server, or it's your turn in the bucket from a spammer or two that's been playing with crap software and going through some broken open-proxied servers somewhere. But untill you can get a copy of something that shows even some partial headers, there's no one here that can take a guess. (and again, no idea what's got JT so busy of late)

[nukespam]

I've get one comletely blank spam message almost every week. Everything is empty with only a few headers, not enough for SpamCop to do very much with. It could be used by a spammer to seek out valid email addresses that are deliverable. I first saw one about a year ago. I think even the Received: headers are somehow stripped, I'll check again next time.

[Keithj]

I have many e-mail accounts routing via Spamcop - some of them I have never used to send mail, yet they get spammed. I could go round turning off each one in turn, to find out where the blank e-mails are coming from - or turn them all off and watch.

Before I did that, I was rather hoping for an answer on here that said "Yes, it's a known trick that some spammers are doing" with some information about it. If nobody else is getting it, then it's not a general thing and I'll do my own investigation.

Surprised, though, with the number I get (like 15 - 20 a day) that nobody else is seeing this.

[Wazoo]

or it's your turn in the bucket from a spammer or two that's been playing with crap software and going through some broken open-proxied servers somewhere

This is something that "we" have seen ....

[nukespam]

Oh great, I just got another one this morning. The 'Received' headers are actually there, the only other headers in the message are date, return-path, and message-id (plus a few mail reader ones). No recipient, sender, subject, or body. SpamCop identifies the possible spammer IP, accepts the "Received line" but says:

No body provided, check format of submission

[Wazoo]

Semantics again, but just to clear things up ... an e-mail should have only one "header" ... what you seem to be describing are lines (and the lack of lines) within that header block.

That said, you could post what you're seeing so as "we" can see if it matches the others I've mentioned that have been seen ... looking for things like the message ID line only being 3 or 4 characters long, and the mashing together of some other lines ... not that anything will be resolved, but it will answer the question of whther you're seeing the same garbage or if you've got something "new and improved" going on <g>