Really weird Requests

www.mysite.com/directory/cid:GIBBERISH.image.jpg

[akmac]

I was looking in my logs and there were numerous "required but not found URLs" (HTTP code 404) all of them were in the format mysite/mydirectory/cid:GIBBERISH.image.jpg

GIBBERISH is a seemingly random string of letters-all caps, 12 letters long. Don't know what "cid:" is. The image.jpegs are actual images found in my images directory, but not in the directory being searched.

Any ideas as to what this is?

[jezra]

cid stands for "Content ID" and is used for embedding images in an email for offline viewing. If this is showing up in your logs then something went wrong with the formatting of the email or, possibly, someone tried to read the email with an email program that doesn't support cid:. I am by not an expert on this subject, so hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge will chime in.

[akmac]

So someone is attempting to hotlink my image to send in an email...? That's not good.

[jezra]

Does your site send out email newsletters? If not then I would say that someone is trying to embed one of your images into an email and is failing. If so, then you may want to check the code newsletter code to make sure it isn't the culprit.

[akmac]

No, I don't send out a newsletter-at least not that accesses these images. At least they are failing. Now if I could find out who's trying to do it...

[walrus]

I am experiencing a similar thing but its inktomi and they send me to yahoo , who hasnt answered me when i asked them about it.
How common is this stuff?
Below is an excerpt from my logs, i have no directory called rivers.

wj1002.inktomisearch.com - - [14/Feb/2005:08:57:00 -0500] "GET /rivers/indy_music_left.htm HTTP/1.0" 302 228 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]

Neat huh!