Re: [vps-mail] procmail to score an ISO-8859 subject

[Godwin Stewart <gstewart@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 19:30:16 +0100, Sikaspam <sikaspam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
S> > Plus, you often correspond with people in a locale where encoding the
S> > subject is frequent (and MUA's tend to QP-encode).
S> How in the world did you know that, Godwin :)

Was I right? That was a good guess :o)

S> You totally lost me there... what's the charset?B ?

=?iso-8859-1?b?...........?=
  ^^^^|^^^^^ ^-- b = base64, q = quoted-pukable
      +--------- charset

The mailer has to know what charset is used in order to display the decoded
subject correctly. A character 0x90 in ISO-8859-1 is not going to be the
same character as in KOI8-R for example.

S> In fact, the specific spam that a user complained about today was in
S> English with the subject in ISO-8859 and with no accented characters.
S> Perhaps the best approach is to look for the IS with no accents and then
S> body scan for the usual suspects.

Well, you could look for the tell-tale "quoted-printable in subject" and the
*absence* of 8-bit characters. Maybe something like this:

:0
* ^Subject:.*=?[^?]+?q
! ^Subject:.*=[89a-f][0-9a-f]

S> The real story is that if poeple didn't use their professional (and hard
S> to change) addresses for ebay and the the likes, this mostly would not
S> be a problem. One of the first things one woman did when hired was to
S> join a bunch of mailing lists having absolutely nothing to do with work.
S> In fact, on the contrary this was for notification of anti-work stuff
S> like new RealAudio radio stations newsletter.
S> 
S> Oh well, I guess we're paid to deal with this.

Also to educate our clients - when possible, and using as much diplomacy as
possible. I can't see you saying "use another e-mail address, sh*t-for-
brains!" to many of the people you work with :)

-- 
G. Stewart   --   gstewart@xxxxxxxxxxx -- gstewart@xxxxxxxxxxx
Registered Linux user #284683 (Slackware 9.0, Linux 2.4.24)
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