Weird email problem.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

In the last four or five days, I've gotten probably 10 emails that are totally blank. No name, no sender info, no subject line, nothing in the body-no text except for the message from AVG showing this:

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.15/49 - Release Date: 7/14/2005

The date it was sent are shown & the size. Most of them are 3 to 4 KB

Before I call my ISP who are totally clueless-cheap but clueless-I wondered if anyone had any idea what's going on

I use MS2000 pro & XP Pro. I also use Outlook for email.

best

[RoyGBiv]

1. E-mail Address Mining ...

This is most likely an automated bit of SPAM that's looking for valid e-mail addresses. If the e-mail doesn't bounce, the e-mail address is flagged as valid. What people do with these lists of valid e-mail addresses varies. Sometimes they sell them as part of a bulk listing of valid e-mail addresses to other SPAMmers, and sometimes people do this to find a valid e-mail address they can use for spoofing.

There's not a lot you can do about it. You might contact your ISP to see if they can trace them and add the originating domains to any SPAM blocker routines they have, but in my experience, most ISPs don't care all that much about a blank message.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

2. Thank you for the info.

I guess I'll have to buy qurb.

best

edited to add: a year or so ago I started getting spam after being on the internets for years with no problem. I downloaded a trial version of qurb & that got rid of them. Everything was fine until a month or so ago when I started getting spammed again. Now I guess they're gearing up to spam me some more. Easy Erections! You've inherited a bazillion dollars!

[RoyGBiv]

3. It's a plague ...

There is simply no way to avoid SPAM altogether. Consider yourself lucky if you only get it irregularly.

I get somewhere around a hundred SPAM messages a day according to my logs. This doesn't include what my ISP blocks for me, and I have no statistics on that. I never see most of them because of Firefox's junk mail controls. It goes in stages, though. SPAMmers find new ways to get around SPAM blockers. One really annoy method being used now relies on the fact that people who can read English don't typically need all the letters in a word to be in order to understand it, as long as the first and last letters are correct. SPAM blockers have trouble creating a rule out of these messages that doesn't also capture legitimate messages.

Anyway ... good luck.