At 15:52 2003-07-07 -0700, multimedia-fan(_at_)myrealbox(_dot_)com wrote:
Anyone has received any legitimate emails with subject lines with the
ISO-8859-1 "encoding"?
I can't say that I really have, but if specifying the encoding is a
legitimate practice when posting in other encodings, it is surely
legitimate practice for the "default" encoding.
Note that there's a difference between apparently specifying ISO-8859-1 as
a subject encoding, and say, mentioning it as part of a topic.
I performed a quick search of recent months email on my system (which is
hardly an exhaustive search of my own email, or representative of the whole
of the internet), and spotted ONE post on the MYSQL list which specified
character encoding for ISO-8859-1.
There are of course, a number of messages with OTHER encodings, most of
which I reject nowadays (see a post of mine from several months back re:
character encodings).
For reference, the mailer in that MYSQL post was identified as:
X-Mailer: DCS.net Webmail ver. 0.1
While dcs.net is the same domain as the origin of the message itself, it's
perhaps more significant to note that it's not an English-language site to
start with, and thus explicitly defining the character set probably isn't
that odd a thing for them to do.
Lots of spam lately come with headers like this:
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1<rest of subject line>.
Of course a recipe for filtering that out is very easy, but I am
wondering whether if it is a good idea to add that in my procmailrc.
1. Consider adding it anyway, then, rather than discarding the message as
the action, emit a line to the log, then grep your log for these
events. This is a COMMON approach to adding recipes to check for
conditions which you are not positive of.
2. Set up the recipe in a sandbox and throw large quantities of saved email
at it. This is why I retain my SPAM mailbox rather than simply discarding
spam messages - they're useful when I want to check nonspam v. spam
messsages against revised filters.
3. Look to the list archives for "SPAMMISHNESS". If your experience is
that the messages you're receiving with this characteristic are spam, then
rather than flagging it outright as spam, use it to "elevate" the
spammishness of a message such that even just a few other characteristics
will cause it to be classified as spam.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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