[PLUG] s.p.a.m with no to field

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Wed Nov 4 16:10:11 UTC 2015


On Tue, 3 Nov 2015, Dick Steffens wrote:

> Lately I've been getting s.p.a.m that comes with a from, but no to 
> field. It only matters because this account gets e-mail forwarded to 
> it from my old Comcast account. Some of the s.p.a.m I get from the 
> old account comes with the old address in the to field. As far as I 
> know, I don't get much, if any, s.p.a.m addressed to this account. I 
> use Thunderbird, and I tried looking at it with all headers, as 
> opposed to normal, but there's still to field.
>
> Is that condition -- no to field -- useful for some legitimate 
> purpose?

In organizations without any low-overhead mechanism for maintaining 
group mail lists, people will often resort to using a Bcc: header 
with scads of addresses. Often those folks with put themselves in th 
To: header, but sometimes it's left blank.

That's the only remotely legitimate use I seen of headers as you 
describe them.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W


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