Vacation gobbledygook?

[t0p]

For the past 3 days I've been getting email like the attached text file.

I don't know the sender Joshua Wilko. But data in the message headers shows that the email has something to do with Freecycle, of which I am a member.

The subject: of the mail says "Vacation reply"; but I'm sure I haven't sent him an email, so why would I get a reply? And why a reply filled with seeming complete gobbledygook? Is there method to this madness?

[Post Monkeh]

i used to get spam email all the time.
not so much nw with googlemail though

[t0p]

Of course it is spam, in that it was unsolicited. But most spam nowadays advertises dubious products like prescription drugs or ***** enlargement; or some African (ex) minister wants to put millions of dollars into my bank account; or there's a naughty link, clicking which would pwn a Windows XP machine and add it to a botnet. In short: most spam has a point - it wants you to do something.

But this piece of spam doesn't seem to do anything. There's no ad, no plea for help, no naughty link. It appears to be just a block of "random" text.

Anyone know what this is all about?

[NightwishFan]

Is the email's text content the random characters? That looks like some kind of GPG key. If you do not know the sender, you can safely ignore it.

[hansdown]

I see it comes from a hotmail account, which was good, until microsoft bought it.

Since then, the problems have been diverse.

http://www.google.ca/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=hotmail+spam&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

[t0p]

Thanks for all responses. I assume Mr Wilko has returned from vacation, as the emails have stopped. So I've marked the thread as 'SOLVED', even though nothing actually has been solved.

I might email Mr Wilko, just to see if he can explain what was up. Curiosity killed the cat, but I'm more of a razor-backed were-pig.