[LINK] another weird email thingy

[Craig Sanders]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 08:21:34AM +1000, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> Linkers,
> sorry if this is a technical question and outside the list's purview. But, 
> I'm seeing this sort of Subject line on some emails recently:
> Subject: 
> =?iso-8859-7?B?UmU6IFtCb3JuMldyaXRlXSChcm9pZHMgLSBBIFBvZW0gLSBvciBwZXJo?=
>  =?iso-8859-7?B?YXBzIGEgY29tbWVudGFyeQ==?=
>
> any idea what would cause that? they appear to be from yahoo          
> groups today, but others really have been spam. ??

as i'm sure you know, lots of spam comes through yahoo groups.

i really hate yahoo groups, and will only subscribe to a list hosted
there as a last resort - if there's no alternative list for something
that i'm really interested in.  YG lets through way too much spam,
almost all of which gets rejected by MY anti-spam filters, thus
triggering YG's bounce-handling which then promptly changes my
subscription status to "nomail" until i re-enable it. very annoying -
it's effectively punishing me for having better anti-spam protection
than they have.

fortunately, there's nothing i want from YG these days.

in any case, i see YG as some sort of lowbrow perpetual-newbie ghetto
where almost all users are not only ignorant of email conventions (like
not top-posting) but are actively hostile to non-stupid ways of doing
things.



> Older ones were definitely with different character sets, but the two
> recent ones were standard characters in the body of the message.

the =?iso... is a way of using non-7-bit (i.e. non-ASCII) characters in
message Subject headers (which, like ALL mail headers, are restricted to
7-bit characters for historical reasons).

i.e. it's for using different character sets.

according to various config files in my /etc directory, ISO-8859-7 is for
Greek.

like anything else to do with mail, spammers will use and abuse it,
but there are legitimate uses and mail clients in non-english-speaking
countries routinely use it.

personally, i never have any need to receive mail in foreign character
sets so i use it to bump up my spamassassin score. i also have some
postfix header_checks rules to reject some specific characters sets
(chinese, russian, japanese, and some others)....that may (very rarely)
reject some legit mail but since i can't read it anyway that's no loss
to me. not recommended for general use.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

"If you're a real good kid, I'll give you a piggy-back ride on a buzz-saw."
		-- W. C. Fields