Deleted

Deleting 6292 spam emails has a surprisingly calming effect over me. Maybe I’m just in a mood. I deliberately let these spam emails accumulate on the off chance that someone sends me an email and misspells the first half of my email address. Misspelled emails would go to the catch-all, which is where all this spam goes. I monitor these in the old Alpine text-only email to avoid setting off alerts to the spammers by loading single-pixel gifs or other media content hidden in the mails.

For gits and shiggles I asked ChatGPT to explain the subject line of the last email. Here is what I learned:

As a spam email subject line, this text is doing something very specific and very common.

开住宿 √ 餐饮曝

What it’s trying to do (not what it literally says)

This is deliberately malformed, mixed-signal Chinese used to:

Evade spam filters
- Mixing symbols (√), uncommon characters (曝), and truncated phrases
- Avoiding full grammatical sentences
- Using industry keywords without context
Signal certain scam categories
The keywords are chosen because they correlate with:
- 住宿 (lodging / hotels)
- 餐饮 (food & beverage / restaurants)
  These are commonly used in:
- fake business opportunity scams
- fake supplier / wholesale offers
- fake licensing or “exposure / promotion” services
- phishing aimed at small business owners
Create curiosity without clarity
The subject line is intentionally ambiguous so recipients open the message to “figure it out.”

Why the wording is odd

曝 by itself is abnormal in subject lines; it’s shorthand for 曝光 (“exposure,” “visibility,” “promotion”).
开住宿 is incomplete; it implies “open lodging” or “activate accommodation status”, which only makes sense in:
- admin panels
- regulatory notices
- scam messages pretending to be official platforms

Practical takeaway

This subject line strongly indicates:

Automated spam
Not written for native readability
Designed to bypass filters, not communicate

You can safely treat this as low-effort Chinese commercial spam and ignore or filter it.

I next fed ChatGPT the complete HTML content of the email, without the headers. The headers contained email addresses of deceased friends who used to have POP3 email accounts @sorabji.com. This may be of interest only to me but here is the content of the email followed by ChatGPT’s assessment:

This is a classic spam / probe message, and its structure is actually more informative than its content.

What this email actually is

It is not meant to be read by a human.

It is almost certainly one (or more) of the following:

A mailbox-validation probe
A spam-filter evasion test
A dead-drop / signaling email
A failed or intentionally stripped payload

Key indicators and what they mean

1. `charset=gbk`

GBK is a Mainland China character encoding.
This aligns with the Chinese subject line you showed earlier.
Often used in bulk-mail tooling still running on very old Windows systems.

2. `MSHTML 11.00.9600.21615`

This is Internet Explorer 11’s rendering engine.
Strong signal of:
- very old automation
- commodity spam kits
- or malware-adjacent tooling
Legitimate senders do not generate email this way anymore.

3. Almost entirely ` `

This is deliberate.
Purpose:
- Make the email technically “non-empty”
- Avoid triggering “blank email” heuristics
- Push real content far down where scanners may not parse

4. The strange mixed-number line

This is intentional obfuscation.

Breakdown:

Arabic numerals: 13 06 15 18
Chinese numerals mixed in:
- 一 = 1
- 七 = 7
- 五 = 5

This pattern is commonly used to:

defeat regex-based spam rules
encode a campaign ID, routing code, or sender fingerprint
act as a marker for automated replies or later follow-ups

It is not meant to decode to a sentence.

5. The trailing number

This is very likely:

a batch ID
a recipient hash fragment
or a delivery confirmation token

These are commonly used so the spammer can later:

correlate bounces
identify “live” inboxes
target follow-up phishing or scams

Why the email has no message

This is the key point.

What it means in practice

Your address was being tested, not marketed to
The sender wanted to know:
- Does this mailbox exist?
- Does it accept HTML?
- Does it auto-load content?
- Does it bounce?