Hello, On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 05:18:54PM +0200, Sébastien Gautrin wrote: > The "stop your mail" and "PLEASE STOP YOUR MAILS" messages are definitely > not created by the owners of the email, though it might be done by a mobile > app as suggested.
I've replied off-list to some of them to explain what (I think) is happening and they carry on conversation exactly as if they are very confused humans who just want the spam to stop. I've also had my own email address used as the from address of similar spam, thus forcing me to receive hundreds of "STOP THE MAIL" responses that look similar to these. At that time I came up with a boilerplate explanatory email to send back to these complainants, and any replies I got seemed similarly human-generated. > The proof of this is that they all have nearly the exact same content (some > add the list mail, some don't), all being HTML messages formatted the same > way. It may come as a shock to you but most non-technical email users use HTML email. > The source of those emails also clearly show that they are not sent by a > traditional mailer, but most likely by a java-written automated program on > windows, as seen in the message id, which for this last one was > > 773946604.1112.1499496543913.JavaMail.www@wwinf1f28 That is simply a Java mail-sending library, so could very well be a mobile email app. Lots of normal people read and respond to email on their phones. > We can thus definitely conclude that those requests to unsubscribe are > indeed spam themselves, though it is still really unclear what their true > purpose are. I'm sorry but I don't think we can definitely conclude that. For me the simplest explanation is merely that spam runs are taking place with random addresses of real people and mailing lists used as the from address. It is something I have seen happen for going on 2 decades now, and had happen to me from time to time (as in, my addresses were used as the from address). I have no need to concoct scenarios where the list is being deliberately targeted in order to explain the behaviour we see. Spammers generally send a lot of email and are not interested in responding to any replies they get. They just want people to click on links. But if one were to believe that it is some sort of attack, there isn't very much that one could do about it anyway, aside from completely ignoring all of those emails. There's no real downside in ignoring them so I'm not going to get worked up about people taking it so personally! Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
