Empty email mystery
because the messages have no content at all, they can’t be malicious
QInfrequently, when I open Mail on my iPad or iPhone, I see several empty messages in my Inbox. These messages display no sender, subject or content, and are each dated 01/01/1970. Should I be concerned, and how can I get them to stop?
AThese are null messages. In the past, they’ve been sent deliberately by some unidentified person. They could get stuck in some mail systems, and even crash old email clients. More recently, though, email systems have been updated to handle them without problems, and whoever was sending the blank messages seems to have ceased that activity.
If you see them now, they’re more likely to be artefacts generated unintentionally when a mail server is having a bad time, or iCloud is out of sorts. They’re still unusual, and getting them in a batch of 10 or a dozen is odd.
Because the messages have no content at all, they can’t be malicious. Without a return address, they couldn’t even be used to test whether contacting a particular mail address results in the message being ‘bounced’ as an error, which is a technique employed to tell whether an address is worth sending spam to. If you were to be bombarded with hundreds at a time, it would be worth contacting your email service provider, which may only deny the messages’ existence.
These messages are a good reminder, though, to check that your Mail settings in Settings > Accounts & Passwords match those advised by the provider. Sometimes they change the address of the preferred mail server, and you might be connecting to an old server that’s now intended as a reserve. Otherwise, delete them in the normal way.