Gene Heskett wrote:
On Tuesday 09 February 2010, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
OK All,
Please let me know if anyone has seen this one before.
We have SA configured to insert "*****SPAM***** in the
beginning of the subject lines of spams before sending them on to
customers, then mail the message as an attachment to the user
along with the SA report as to why it's spam.
Lately I've seen a new trick the spammers are using.
They are putting characters in the subject line that
are not text characters - I don't know what they are,
I haven't looked into this closely yet. Our SA installation
is correctly tagging this as spam and sending it forward
to the user.
The problem is the mail client program, specifically
Thunderbird. There must be a bug in T-bird that is tickled
by these non-text characters because although the Subject
line exists with ***SPAM*** in it if I look at the actual
message in the mailbox with an editor, T-bird displays
the subject line as a BLANK subject. Of course, since the
Subject is blank then you don't see that it is SPAM and
you have to go to the bother of opening it before you see
the SA report that it's spam.
This has only happened to a few spams so far, and I want
to nip it in the bud.
Now, why don't I just write a rule in T-bird that trashes mail
that has a blank subject line, I hear you ask?
It's because we have a few moronic customers who seem to
think it's OK to send out e-mails with blank subject lines!!
Put a valid subject line required into your TOS, mail it to everybody, & then
do it a day later, bounce it at them if no subject line content. They will
either jump ship in which case offer to hold the door, or come around and do
it right in a day or so.
I have doubts that the offenders can even read at all, let alone
read a TOS or even know what it is. We have customers
who call in for tech support and when I tell them to open their
web browser they don't know what I'm talking about. I swear to
God this is true, I'm not making a joke!
I got a call the other day from a customer who is a dialup
customer who was planning on buying one of those Atom-based
half-a-laptop netbooks and wanted to know how to put a modem on it -
and she was NOT planning on doing this because she was
traveling - she was planning on keeping her dialup as
her main Internet connection at home!! (don't even ask
what she is currently using, just imagine)
We've got calls in the past from customers who disconnected
service from us (went to some other DSL provider than us)
and wanted to know why their e-mail stopped working (and
expected us to fix it!)
Ted
It would be most useful if when SA was creating the subject
lines of the e-mails with the spams attached, that instead of
just blindly copying over the Subject line from the spam and
inserting the *****SPAM***** in front of the subject, that
SA stripped out all the non-text characters in the Subject
line.
Any suggestions appreciated! (even the smart-ass ones but
they have to be clever)
Thanks!
Ted
