Empty Emails

This is about co-called empty emails. Following on from silent phone calls it's no surprise that I don't much like empty emails either. But there the comparison ends.

Because empty emails originate from possibly the worst kind of Internet scum-life.

Empty emails are spam, certainly. But they go beyond spam. Empty emails consist of nothing in the From line, nothing in the To line, nothing in the Subject line and no content whatseover. It is a blank email. Pointless, you might think. Not so. Because, instantly recognisable sitting there looking quite useless in your inbox, they have but one purpose: to trigger autoresponder emails of the type that announce that you are away on holiday for a couple of weeks.

If that happens then the senders of the empty emails will try to find your physical address, and then sell it to criminals who will then break into your home, steal your belongings and turn your life into a nightmare upon your return from holiday. That is what empty emails are for.

Notice how you get much, much more of them during the summer months?

Caution: never set up an email autoresponder letting the world know you are away from home. Would you pin the same message to your front door while you were away?

One final point. The reason that as few details as possible are given by the empty email sender is that they will want to leave as small a footprint as possible. To trigger an email autoresponder all that is necessary is to reach that address, Subject line or no Subject line. If you want to know who it's from then you will have to look in the Headers (see my post in this blog 'What To Do With Spam').