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How do i enter information in the body of a blank


albert

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it was suggested that when a person gets a spam with no message, we should enter

"blank spam" or something like that in order to send it to spam cop.

when i receive a blank spam, i am unable to type in the body. is there a way to do it?

please let me know how to type in a spam that is blank in the body so i can send it to spam cop.

thanks

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This can only be done if you are forwarding without attachment or pasting into the webform. I wish the safeguard could be removed from forwarded attachments and SpamCop Mail System submissions.

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This can only be done if you are forwarding without attachment or pasting into the webform.  I wish the safeguard could be removed from forwarded attachments and SpamCop Mail System submissions.

Blank spams can be forwarded "as attachment" relatively easily, with a little ingenuity (assuming sending attachments is supported by the email program). The degree of difficulty is roughly equivalent to pasting the spam into the parsing box and adding the line saying there was 'no message body'.

I'll post the solution if anyone is interested.

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This can only be done if you are forwarding without attachment or pasting into the webform.  I wish the safeguard could be removed from forwarded attachments and SpamCop Mail System submissions.

Blank spams can be forwarded "as attachment" relatively easily, with a little ingenuity (assuming sending attachments is supported by the email program). The degree of difficulty is roughly equivalent to pasting the spam into the parsing box and adding the line saying there was 'no message body'.

I'll post the solution if anyone is interested.

Go ahead, make my day! (apologies to Clint Eastwood) :)

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This can only be done if you are forwarding without attachment or pasting into the webform.  I wish the safeguard could be removed from forwarded attachments and SpamCop Mail System submissions.

Blank spams can be forwarded "as attachment" relatively easily, with a little ingenuity (assuming sending attachments is supported by the email program). The degree of difficulty is roughly equivalent to pasting the spam into the parsing box and adding the line saying there was 'no message body'.

I'll post the solution if anyone is interested.

Go ahead, make my day! (apologies to Clint Eastwood) :)

This is the Windoze version, but users of other O/S' should be able to adapt it as long as their email client supports sending attachments.

The short version:

1. Copy the spam source and paste it into a plain text editor.

2. Add the "message body contained no data" comment below the headers

3. Save the file.

4. Open an email composition window and attach the file.

5. Send it to your individualized report submission address.

For slightly more than "novice" Windoze users here's a more detailed set of instructions:

1. Open the view of the spam's source (you should see only headers) and copy & paste it into a new, blank plain text editor window (NotePad is recommended for Windows users)

NOTE: If there is any content in the message body portion you don't have a true blank message body. Copy the entire spam source, paste it into the text editor window adding NOTHING, then skip step 2 and proceed to step 3.

2. Leave ONE blank line under the headers, then type "email had no message body", or something similar, on the next line - make sure that there are NO blank lines in the headers (remove any blank lines if you find them) and that there is at least ONE blank line between the headers and your comment.

3. Save the file somewhere where you can easily find it and use a name that you can remember such as "spam.txt" If you have more than one blank spam "spam1.txt", "spam2.txt", etc. will work. The name really doesn't matter but it should be something easy to recognize . . . and since it's "spam" . . .

4. Go to your email program and open up a new email composition.

·a· Address the email to your individual spam submission address.

·b· I recommend "Reply anyway" (without the quotes) as the Subject, but anything will do.

·c· Do NOT type anything in the message body portion.

5. Click on the "attach" button, in the attachment window, or however your email program is designed to select attachments. Navigate to the place where you saved "spam.txt" (it may be seen simply as spam or spam1, spam2- without the .txt extension being visible depending on your setup) and attach it to the email.

If you had more than one blank spam attach "spam1.txt", then attach "spam2.txt", etc. I don't recommend attaching more than 5 files even though the parser can reportedly handle more (and hopefully you won't have that many blank spams anyway).

6. Click on "Send".

NOTES: I tested a submission using the .txt extension and it worked without problems. More advanced users may want to use .eml (or other extension used by their email client) to ensure total compatibility and reduce the chances of the parser barfing at the odd attachment extension. Novice Windows users can save the file as "spam.eml" (USE THE QUOTE MARKS) if they wish, and more advanced Windows users can either save the file using the Quote marks or instruct Windows to use the non-.txt extension in the usual manner.

Users of other O/S may want to change the extension to something compatible with their O/S.

Added: BTW, AFAIK this method hasn't been approved by TPTB. It might be wise to give the admins and/or Deputies sufficient time to comment if they don't approve of submitting "no body" spams in this manner. It's not really different from pasting the spam into the web site and adding the comment that 'there was no message body' so it shouldn't be a problem - but I don't have the authority to say this method is acceptable.

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If you're using Outlook, I've got some VBA code that I'm using that not only addresses that issue, but also has many other features:

1) The ability to select several spam messages at once for submission.

2) 3-click start-to-finish spam submission (click 'Submit As spam' button, wait for AutoResponder email, click link in AutoResponder email, click 'Submit' button on SpamCop web page).

3) Whitelist - checks the address of the spam sender against your Contacts folder (if someone you know sends you an email, and it accidentally ends up in your spam folder, and you accidentally select it for spam submission, it'll prompt you and give you the chance to cancel submitting that message as spam).

4) Automatically marks reported spams as Read.

5) Checks Read status while submitting... if the email is already marked as Read, it'll prompt you. The assumption is that since the emails are marked as Read after submission, if it's marked as Read it's probably already been submitted.)

6) Error checking so you can't try to submit non-mail items (i.e.: Contacts, Calendar items, etc.)

7) Gives you the option of deleting the spam and the spam reports after submitting the spam to SpamCop.

8) If you decide to keep the spam reports, it gives you the option of moving them to a sub-folder of your Sent Items folder.

9) 'spam Count' button... gives you the number of spams you've received so far today, along with a projection based on that number of how many you'd receive per hour / per day / per week / per month / per year. Includes interface to the Office Assistant, so if your Office Assistant is showing, the prompts will show via the Outlook Assistant, otherwise, you'll get a dialog box.

10) The ability to submit to other spam-fighting entities (I submit my spam to 8 spam-fighting entities). I'm not afraid of submitting non-munged spam reports via SpamCop... when the spammers see that I'm submitting to not only the Federal Trade Commission, but to several Block Lists, they tend to want to leave me alone.

11) An Excel spreadsheet that will automatically fetch the spam messages Received Time, Sender Address, and Subject (for building dynamic Block Lists), with a spam Receival Rate chart and a scatter plot of the daily spam receival rate divergence.

12) A 'Safe Preview' button that will show you both the .HTMLBody and the .Body of the message (this prevents web-bugs in the email from working, while letting you see what the email says).

13) It uses the Redemption DLL (NO OUTLOOK SECURITY DIALOGS!).

14) Fixes a developing problem with extra tricky spammers. (They create Multipart email messages, manually insert the <!-- Converted from text/" blurb into the message, putting nonsense text in the .Body, and putting the actual message in .HTMLBody. They then format the email message as plain text. Before the code fix, this effectively hid .HTMLBody from our code, but Outlook still shows .HTMLBody. Thus, the end user saw the actual message, while our VBA code only saw the nonsense text in .Body.) This is a trick that more and more spammers are using to thwart automated spam reporting tools. Some spammers have set themselves up as 'Interested Third Parties' on SpamCop, and after sending the first test message with this format, and looking over the resulting spam report, and figuring out that it indeed worked, I got flooded with emails of this format. As soon as I changed the code to take this trick into account, the flood abruptly stopped.

I'm looking for expert VBA/VB coders who want to help me and Leon Mayne (the code's originator) in creating a free, self-installing Outlook add-in, so that even newbies can use it without having to know VBA.

If you want to help out, or if you want the latest VBA code, email me.

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