full-disclosure - Strange Emails -- What are they?

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Message-ID: <200606071722.16327.tonu@jes.ee>
Date: Wed Jun  7 16:30:58 2006
From: tonu at jes.ee (Tonu Samuel)
Subject: Strange Emails -- What are they?

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 16:10, Simon Smith wrote:
> Hi List,
>     I've had roughly one dozen people forward emails to me from
> different companies asking me to figure out what these emails are. The
> emails appear to be emails from the from the recipient. For example,
> John Doe appears to be sending an email to himself, but he's not. In
> reality when checking the mail server logs I find that the mails
> originate from the Internet.  Other emails like the one below contain a
> different sender than the recipient but the contents of the emails are
> the same and they are still from the same domain.

We had same question and came to possible conclusions that spammers test 
validity of their spambases. When sending mail like this, it is possible to 
find out if user exists (mail accepted) or user don't exists (error code 5xx 
received). Sender and receiver addresses are same because otherwise mail may  
bounce out of system and go into spamtrap. Spammers do not want to fall 
there.

    T?nu