Strange display in KMail of HTML mail.

[Duncan]

phillips88 posted on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:09:35 +1100 as excerpted:

> On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 22:55:42 Duncan wrote:
>> > 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".
> 
> Is this how your mail should look when "raw":-
> 
> 
cGhpbGxpcHM4OCBwb3N0ZWQgb24gVGh1LCAwMSBBcHIgMjAxMCAyMDo0NTo0NSArMTEwMCBhcyBl

> etc?

That's what's called "encoded".  It happens in one of two cases.

1) If the mail has an attachment, the attachment will be encoded.  The 
reason there is that internet mail isn't 8-bit-clean; binary files cannot 
be sent as-is; they must be encoded into text first, then decoded on the 
other end.

2) Spammers sometimes use encoding to obfuscate a message so it's more 
difficult for the anti-spam filters to properly filter.

In either case, the message headers, to, from, subject, the received 
headers for tracing, etc, should show up unencoded.

If it's an attachment, there will normally be a readable text message as 
well, tho if it's a friend sending just a picture (say) to a friend, the 
text message may be skipped and it'll only have the attachment.  If it's 
spam and the spammer is deliberately obfuscating it using encoding, there 
may well be no unencoded body, or only a very short javascript to do the 
unencoding, depending on what time of encoding was used.

-- 
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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