Weird emails that you and people from other companies have received

Pantelis Kalogiros
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

If you, like me, have gotten a weird email that looks like this and you are wondering what kind of new spam it is…

privacy granted only to those who deserve it

Know that you might be receiving a torrent of spam soon.

The bittersweet thing, is that spammers deemed you probably important enough to target you, so hey at least there’s that.

What is going on?

They are essentially checking to see if your email address is valid (can receive mail) or if it bounces. Probable reasons for that, is that they plan on;

  1. Sending marketing (spam) campaigns using a platform like mailchimp or amazon ses that rates your credibility on how many bounces you have gotten — and penalizes you if you don’t play nice.
  2. Sell an email list to someone for potential leads. But the list in order to be worth anything needs to be “clean”, with only valid up to date emails.

In the email I received today, the other recipients are from a different company (but same sector), and have titles comparable to mine. So they are specifically gathering email addresses that belong to people with title X that work in companies in sector Y.

How does it work?

They are creating a bunch of numbered email accounts. In this case “texakt 0007” and they range possibly from 0001 to all the +1 way up.

Each account is only going to send a handful of emails, so that it doesn’t trigger the email provider’s spam checks. That’s why they are so many numbered ones, and they only include 4–5 people in each email.

In my case, I received an email from account 0007, my company’s name begins with FY and more people were included in the email from a company that begins with a G.
This means that it’s alphabetically ascending but for some reason they only created and used 7 sending-email addresses to reach letter G, so they might have even more strict specific selection criteria.
Maybe they are targetting people who are really really good looking with title X that work in sector Y. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I suppose they are grabbing people’s emails from company websites, linkedin profiles, or trying to guess them by attempting to do first-name-first-letter + last-name @ companyurl.

Only you can prevent this!

Report them to their email provider as spam. You might think it won’t move the needle, but email is a huge fragile system based on trust and they take this seriously.

Or… if you want to beat them in their own game, reply back with a notification failure/bounce like email. Yup. Or if you have control over your mail server, then send them a real one.
This will mark your email address as deactivated to the spammers and they will remove you from their lists.

So, yes, see how they say “please ignore this message”? Do not ignore it! Unless if you are curious as to what horrors and bad promotions you are going to receive in your work inbox next.


I wrote this because I want to shine light to what sneaky evil practices spammers use. I do not support or condone such practices. On the contrary, I believe explaining to people what is going on is the first step on dealing with such situations.

Sadly, for as long as people are willing to buy email lists (I do not really care if the list you bought is properly or illicitly acquired you are part of the problem) and are on the look out for the next “email marketing hack” this sort of thing will keep happening. Ah, how we need a good practices and ethics class for the responsible email marketing people…

Pantelis Kalogiros

Written by

VP of Web @ Fyusion. Born and managed to remain in some form of existence ever since. Science still hasn't figured out how. Opinions and writing, personal.

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