I have been seeing this sort of spam come up on several different mail servers I work on.
The email is definitely spam and it tests positive for a few RBL, but not enough to raise its score significantly. The one I got the other day only scored 2.9.
I know that on my system I send back a 554 User Unknown error for any piece of spam I catch. I am thinking that spammers won't delete you from their list initially. Instead, they will send a blank email with no body (more likely to get through). If that email gets through, then they know that your address really does exist.
Any thoughts?
I think you're mistaken in the impression that spammers actually ever get the bounce messages in the first place.
In general having a large number of "dud" addresses in their list is of little consequence to a spammer, so I'd be very surprised if they bothered to do any sort of list cleaning or address verification.
Since they are generally abusing an open relay, the dud addresses don't clog up their servers. Since the return-path is usually forged, the bounce messages don't clog up their servers either.
554'ing your spam won't get you off any spammer's list.. it just sends yet another bounce message to whoever got joe-jobbed. IMO the only advantage to bouncing spam over quietly deleting it is that legitimate senders will be notified that their message got killed. The drawback is that you're adding to the problem caused by joe-jobs
I've seen a lot of "empty body" spam myself lately. Personally I attribute this to broken spam generation tools that somehow fail to properly send the body of the message. There's lots broken mass-mail software out there, as is evidenced by the "RANDOM_WORD" markup seen in many spams from one of the tools.
Based on the traffic profile I'd venture to guess that the latest release of one of these packages has a bug when opening the file to use as a body template, and spammers are using it without realizing their message isn't being sent.
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: Parasoft Error proof Web apps, automate testing & more. Download & eval WebKing and get a free book. www.parasoft.com/bulletproofapps1 _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
