[lug] email mystery

Scott Herod scott.herod at colorado.edu
Tue Feb 20 20:27:01 MST 2001


"D. Stimits" wrote:
> 
> Thanks! I am going to see if I can get idcomm to look into this, I get a
> ton of junk that is in no way addressed to me. RSS seems like a good
> idea. I'm still confused as to how this could actually reach my
> particular account without it being addressed anywhere...seems like a
> bug being exploited.
> 
> D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com
> 

I don't know if it still happens a lot but one old trick
was to send the ad to a bogus email address at some machine
and BCC: a huge list of addresses.  The mail would bounce,
of course, but sendmail would still forward the BCC's.  
Then it would appear that mail was coming from that machine
and since BCCs are not visible, you couldn't see all of
the addresses.  SGI's sendmail was bad about doing this.

Scott



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