In the Usenet newsgroup alt.computer.security, in article
<ldo-8BC2F8.15243809102005@lust.ihug.co.nz>, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> phishee <phishee@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>> What's the purpose of those semi-coherent or blank body e-mails that
>> slip past spam filter's?
>
>I'm assuming they're bugs in the spamming software. Or in the users
>using them.

Nah - harvester 'bots. The messages occur far to often to be bugs or
brane-dead users. Scan through 'comp.mail.sendmail' and you'd spot
mail admins complaining about them.

Latest trick seems to be grabbing names out of telephone books, and trying
those as usernames - perhaps with one or two numbers tacked on, or leading
or trailing inital (smith3, jsmith, or smithj).

Used to be you'd create a username (as above), and an initial password by
mime-encoding or uuencoding the output of /dev/random. The password would
look like garbage, and the new user would change it to something they can
remember (and often quite insecure - but that's another story). Now, I'm
creating usernames the same way ('head -2 /dev/random | uuencode ZZZZ' then
take the first ten or twenty characters of the result). Might not be easy
to remember, but it's also pretty hard to guess. ;-)

Old guy