Hi,
From: "Jason R. Mastaler"
Subject: Re: Spammer auto-confirming their spam
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 19:10:40 -0700
> Robert Withrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > I notice I get a lot of spam that has subject or from lines
> > beginning with "=?big5?" or "=?gb2312?" or the like. Is it safe to
> > filter those kinds of mail out or can someone innocently create mail
> > with those kinds of subjects?
>
> This indicates RFC 2047 header encoding of Chinese characters, so it
> can indicate someone innocently creating messages.
Yes.
> The question is, why is someone sending you Chinese e-mail if you
> can't read it? So, in most cases, the only such messages you will
> receive will be spam. You might `bounce' rather than `drop' if you're
> concerned about legitimate messages, so at least the sender has an
> indication that you didn't receive her message.
I have a slightly different take here -- if you work w/ folks based in
countries that use non-ASCII mainly, those folks may have from headers
w/ non-ASCII (err, rather, MIME-encoded non-ASCII). This shouldn't be
surprising (-;
Some of these folks can converse in English -- but that doesn't mean
that when they do, that they change their from headers to be
non-MIME-encoded ASCII.
Note, it's also possible that the content is actually English (or
rather, pure-ASCII), but some of the headers aren't. It's also
possible that the content is intended to be all ASCII, but isn't --
see below.
For the particular case of Japanese [1], it also happens that
sometimes non-ASCII makes it into the subject line -- even if the post
is intended to be in English.
An example of one of the reasons this occurs, there is what's known as
"full-width" alphabet characters. on an appropriately configured
system, these appear to be wider equivalents of the letters of the
alphabet -- but they are not ASCII-encoded.
My two cents, FWIW.
[1] I don't have direct comparable experience w/ other non-ASCII using
folks.
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