Blank emails

[Andreas Pardeike]

Jozef Hitzinger wrote:

> I've seen these a few months ago quite a lot, now it ceased. If it appears
> again in quantities that'll be a problem, I plan to patch MTA to refuse
> mail without headers (fisrt line in DATA section is empty) during SMTP
> phase.
> 
> I know it's not strictly following the RFC, but in a world where so many
> mails abuse that RFC by forging headers, it's one of the ways to ease
> things for the us before we get some SMTP fix/replacement. It's about how
> many legitimate mails without headers you expect to get (me zero).

At first I thought that those empty emails were just a clever way to 
work around spam filters by having users delete them without classifying 
them as spam. The idea here is that if you just send out enough empty 
emails before you deliver the payload (real message) then most filters 
might pass the payload message as ham because of the very hammy headers.

But then again, quite some of those empty emails contain little if not 
no header information at all. So my second guess is that there is some 
kind of buggy or difficult to configure spam software out and lots of 
spammers have problems with it.

Still, I see this as an interesting phenomena,
Andreas Pardeike