Anyone Seen This Sort Of "spam"?

[tonydi]

I have a client who is getting a few thousand emails a day that have subject lines like this....

Subject: SM:88.137.83.135:3977:SOCKS4

The emails are mostly blank and some don't even have the full compliment of headers.

I've had people suggest that this is someone scanning for proxy servers and has made a typo on the email these results should be sent to and they're going to my client by mistake. But it's been going on for 4 days and I'd think that whoever was doing that sort of thing would realize they aren't getting emails back.

The info in the headers is bogus and seems to be generated info because the names are bizarre. Each email is unique, both in Subject line and the From line.

Anyone have any better ideas? I've Googled and even GoogleNews's and this subject type is unique, no hits at all like this.

[Joe]

Wow, thats a new one on me

[Joe]

are they all the same IP address?

[tonydi]

Nope, every single one is different. That's the part that makes me want to believe that it might be some sort of automated open proxy scanner sending back its results.

Worst part of all? The guy is an Earthlink dialup customer so it was taking hours to get the few legit emails he had in his inbox! I'm heading to his office tomorrow to set up a utility that will scan the inbox and can delete emails based on a string in the Subject line. Then he'll have to decide if keeping his current email address is worth the hassle.