Strange display in KMail of HTML mail.

[Duncan]

phillips88 posted on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:45:45 +1100 as excerpted:

> KMail 1.13.1; KDE 4.4.1
> 
> I received an email which displayed as follows:-
> 
> ÿþ

Try viewing the raw mail (aka the source code).  The default kmail hotkey 
for that is "v".  This should give you a window containing the raw text 
"source".  You may be able to figure out from there what's happening, but 
my guess is that it was either corrupted in transit, or probably more 
likely, is "localized" using some charset that you don't have and/or that 
wasn't properly set.  My experience is that such mail is often spam, 
written in Chinese or Korean or some such, that would mean nothing to me 
even if it did display correctly.

Of course, displaying untrusted messages from spammers, malware, whatever, 
as parsed HTML, is strongly discouraged.  Better to display it as plain 
text only and not have to worry about what security vuln the obviously 
incorrectly displayed message might have triggered...  Even messages 
appearing to come from trusted friends may be infested, if they have a 
virus or other malware running on their system.  I'm reminded of the story 
of the victim of the "I love you" virus quite some years ago, who was 
infected by a message from their (obviously trusted) broker.  (Never mind 
why someone's /broker/ of all people, would be sending "I love you" 
messages.  That'd raise my suspicions right there!)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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