Spam sent to contact address

[Tor User]

On 1/18/06, Arrakistor <arrakistor at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Tor User,
>
> If there are html references to remote files inside, this would be a way
> to track you, because it would leave your IP in the access logs via your
> mail program.
>

Yes, that would certainly be possible in principle but i) both spams are
plain-text only, and ii) it is already easy to find the IP address of my tor
server based on the contact address (just scan through all few hundred known
tor servers, conveniently listed e.g. at
http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/exit.pl?sorbw=1&addr=1 ).

I am not at all worried, which is just as well given the amount of other
spam I get :-) I am, however, puzzled as to why anyone would bother to go
into a non-trivial amount of effort to decipher the email address, only to
then use it to send a meaningless one-word message.  I suppose an
explanation might be that the process of harvesting mildly obfuscated email
addresses from the web has been automated and the resulting email addresses
were then used by an utterly incompetent spammer. Another possibility might
be that the spammer had a list of harvested emails not all of which were
necessarily converted correctly from whatever form of obfuscation was used.
It would then make sense for them to try to filter out invalid addresses
before selling the list on, although it is unclear why they would use a
one-word message rather than a real spam that they could have been paid for.
I suspect I will never know.
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