[X4U] Very Odd Blank emails

[Ray Choiniere]

On Jul 13, 2006, at 10:39 AM, Jim Eddy wrote:

> I've recently noticed that I'm getting blank emails--no subject  
> line, no body text, and occasionally no sender listed. I'd been  
> getting a few of them off and on for a while, so when someone  
> (perhaps on this list?) suggested an applescript that puts blank  
> emails directly into the trash. I'm using Apple Mail under 10.3.9.  
> The script seems to work, until I noticed that I had several  
> thousand blank emails in my trash.
> So today, I did a bit of testing and found that the emails come in  
> groups of 42, and these groups come in each time I check email,  
> whether it be 2 seconds or 10 minutes. The individual messages in  
> each group are different from each other (although one sender is  
> repeated 5 times, with different time stamps), but each group of 42  
> is exactly the same as the other groups. The messages are also  
> spread through the 3 accounts I use.
> I assume that it's caused by a virus somewhere, but where? on my  
> machine, or somewhere else? They go harmlessly (I think!) into the  
> trash, and I don't have other problems that I know of from this.  
> Anything to do? It's all very odd.

You might like to get a copy of SpamSieve, my favorite spam filtering  
device, and test it out for a while. It will grab whatever it thinks  
is spam and dump it into a special "spam" folder so you can peek at  
its selections before discarding them. It's very easily trainable, so  
it becomes increasingly accurate as you use it more.

It won't keep the spam from arriving, but it sure helps keep them out  
of your hair.

HTH
Ray