> l have recently been receiving some spams consisting of HTML attachments as base64 MIME encoded!
> The spams are advertisements for purportedly cracked and pirated versions of Windows XP and other expensive payware products. > Why do they send these attachments as base 64 MIME encoded? Is it for the purpose of attempting to conceal the fact that fraud and piracy is being promulgated thru spam as we report the spam to the machines at the abuse reporting addresses? > The abuse examining machines probably aren't likely to care to decode the messages for content and they probably don't care about the content. The machines are probably interested only in reading the headers in order to determine the origin of the spam. > The ISPs that send me this kind of spam don't seem to have any interest in stopping my spam. Do you think the payware outfits whose software is being pirated would take an active interest in stopping this kind of spam? If so, if anyone knows the email addresses of the MicroSoft and Symantec piracy investigation people, please let me know. > Regards, > Sam Heywood I too get spams consisting of base64-encoded HTML attachments, charset = "big5", and Subject: line containing an undecipherable bunch of upper-ASCII characters. Usually I just delete, don't bother to decode the base64. Once I decoded and viewed the attachment offline, and saw a bunch of strange stuff, since I don't have the software to render Chinese or Korean. So I deleted. I don't want to view online, because that would indicate to the senders that the recipient was responding to the spam. Besides, strange Javascript or VBScript can have deleterious, as in Trojan, effects. I also notice many spam messages say I responded to some form, to make it appear to have been solicited. One such message even said it was a response to a feedback form I submitted in 19101, which is 17100 years in the future! Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) on Saturday, December 15, 19101 at 23:07:50 That was evidently sexy stuff, women with live web cams. I have received pirate-software spams but not so recently, and not in HTML that I could recognize. Maybe I missed something? But I get a lot of chain-letter pyramid-scheme spams. I think MS and Symantec investigators would take an active interest in pursuing spammers selling pirate versions of their software. There is the Business Software Alliance, though I don't have their contact info handy.
