TheUsedVersion Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 Moderator Edit: extracted from http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10143 .. moved and re-titled. Hate to start an entirely new thread for this one simple question and since someone has already mentioned it here I thought I would just ask... Someone mentioned in an earlier reply about viewing "potential" spam without opening it. I assume its a web-based program that I can post the message source into in order to view the email without opening it up in Thunderbird. Anyone have a link to said program (web-based or not)? Again, thanks for all the help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wazoo Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 Hate to start an entirely new thread for this one simple question and since someone has already mentioned it here I thought I would just ask... And yet, this query doesn't marry up with the Discussion subject matter you chose to "just toss this one question into" .. never mind making it impossible for some future reader to easily find this data .... Someone mentioned in an earlier reply about viewing "potential" spam without opening it. Fairly easy under most e-mail clients bu disabling the "Preview" function .. and using whatever tools are available to "View the Source" of the e-mail. The next leve/typel of action would typically be the "read your e-mail off-line" scenario. I assume its a web-based program that I can post the message source into in order to view the email without opening it up in Thunderbird. Anyone have a link to said program (web-based or not)? Again, thanks for all the help. ??? That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me .. if one were to "paste in the e-mail" then one would have already had access to see/manipulate the 'source' of said e-mail .... Anyway, PM sent to advise of the handling/movement of the starting post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 Since you mentioned 'message source', perhaps you do know how to view the email without opening it. As Wazoo said, although it may be found differently in different applications, you should be able to find a 'View Source' - basically what that does is open the email with a program that 'sees' the underlying code that makes the words and images appear in a certain way. For instance, in the forum when you bold a word you see the code that makes it bold before and after the word when you are writing the post, but don't see it when you post - only the word itself is made blacker. Perhaps you can already see the message source, but don't understand it. Most spam is written in HTML code (which is why many anti-spammers have their email applications set to read in plain text - in plain text the images are not displayed and neither are the words underlined or italicized, etc.) If you look between the < > you can read what would be displayed if you had opened it. There also may be many lines of HTML code that outline the colors, font, length of lines, etc. before you actually get to the text. I have some experience with code so that I can figure out that <p> starts a paragraph and </p> ends a paragraph, but I don't know what most of the rest of it does like <td> </td> Sometimes attachments (or the text of the email itself) are coded using Base64 (that's all capital letters with no spaces). That can be copied and pasted in a web-based application that translates it into text. I believe there are directions in the original spamcop FAQ. However, the text of the email is usually not very interesting if it is spam and all you want to see the source for are the headers - the instructions that mail servers 'read' and that anti-spammers look at to determine where an email came from. There is an anti-spammer who posts regularly to the newsgroups who is adamant that there is no possible reason why one should ever read a spam message. Of course, those who are interested in closing down spam websites, have to in order to find the name of the website. The spamcop parser doesn't try very hard to decipher extra characters that hide the website name, but to human eyes it is often very obvious - and, for some reason, also to the browser software which can 'read' it so that it takes you to the spam website if you click on the link in the spam. Perhaps I have given you much more than you wanted to know and it doesn't answer your question at all. Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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