I received an email yesterday. No subject. Nothing in the to or from field. It showed up in my collective inbox, not in an individual account folder, but when I hit “reply” my computer wanted to send it from my gmail account, though, of course, no recipient populated. When I selected “view source” for this message, I got what you see below. No IPs or routing. Just a number. Does anyone have an idea what this is?
Fred Leo – "Small enough to care, big enough to feel cramped in coach"
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Hi fred,
maybe someone tried to use smtp via telnet, so no real mail client was used to send that mail.
Try it yourself:
telnet smtp.yourdomain.com
> ehlo justtesting
> mail from: info@sender.com
> rcpt to: your@yourdomain.com
> data
1 40610
.
That should send a strange mail without headers (if your mailserver does not add any).
The content that you see there looks like POP3 raw code, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop3#Dialog_example
Do you have some kind of collection service? Or maybe Outlook fetched the mail via POP3 and made a mistake?
Michael
Thanks, Michael. Much of the explanation is over my head, but from what I can gather, I bet you’re right. I don’t know why anyone would send email via telnet, so it’s probably just a glitch. I have a gmail account I access through pop in outlook, so maybe it was just a hiccup there. Thanks so much for sharing your expertise!