“A Really, Really, Really Long Email from NetSol”

This morning I received an email from Network Solutions. The subject was ".ORG Domain Name Update." Unfortunately, it crashes my mail client every time I try to read it.

No wonder, though. Here's the complete set of headers they provided:

From ???@??? Thu Jan 23 14:38:00 2003
Received: from [216.168.237.71] (helo=networksolutions.com)
	by localhost with esmtp (Exim 4.10)
	id H968NC-000G1L-00
	for SETH(at)MACROBYTE.NET; Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:38:00 -0500
Received: (from root@localhost)
	by networksolutions.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id JAA20696;
	Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:37:52 -0500 (EST)
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:37:52 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200301231437.JAA20696@networksolutions.com>
To: SETH(at)MACROBYTE.NET
From: "Network Solutions, Inc." <customernotification@networksolutions.com>
Subject:  .ORG Domain Name Update
Status:   

Notice they stop quite suddenly. I'm not sure those headers are valid (especially the second Received: header), this may be a spoof, but that's not the point. The real problem was the content of the message, not the incomplete and possibly spoofed headers. There was no real message... just a very, very long list of email addresses.

86,173 of them, to be exact. Nothing else. Just email addreses, each on a line by themselves.

If I was a spammer, I'd think this was a gift!