My guess would be it's to build up reputation of the sending accounts, by being "connected" to trusted, aged, accounts? However, the combination of garbled text + number @ large provider on its own should be pretty suspicious by now. Another idea is some kind of affiliate marketing / pumping attack, but I don't see ads.

Yeah, I think you might be right. I was also thinking that it could be a weird setup of Moltbook-style LLM training?

Kind of out there, but if you were running a network of agents that are autonomously looking for exploits, then perhaps those agents have decided that a good source of fresh ideas might be to periodically receive Schneier’s newsletter in an inbox they control.

That would be a good guess but the post says:

> All Gmail. None of the addresses has actually subscribed to Crypto-Gram. They could; whoever is sending the emails could easily have confirmed the subscription.

I have to agree with one of the commenters that it is probably a categorizing stage on a list of scraped blogger emails.