[Resolved] Empty mail body

[enigma1]

Few of the emails I receive have no mail body. They're blank, they include an "attachment" of course. What's the proper way of reporting those. Using the subject as the body, or make the attachment as the mail body?

[rconner]

Few of the emails I receive have no mail body. They're blank, they include an "attachment" of course. What's the proper way of reporting those. Using the subject as the body, or make the attachment as the mail body?

Assuming you report your spam by pasting into the web page, you probably want to get the raw SMTP packet, which will include the attachment in MIME encoding. This is what you would paste in. SpamCop might truncate the attachment if it is too long for the form, but this should not affect the header and will not interfere with reporting the source (which is what we are interested in).

If you are forwarding your spam by mailing it to your reporting address, you likewise want to get the raw packet into a text file and then attach this file as a MIME attachment to the message you send to SpamCop. There are various ways to do this depending upon the mail software you use.

If you use some unfortunate mail combinations like Outlook/Exchange, then you may have trouble recovering the original SMTP packet. See http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/19.html for help.

-- rick

[Farelf]

Here is an example of what Rick is talking about - an "attachment only" message, handled just fine by the parser:

http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z4349438760z4...97bf5608639091z

(look at the "View entire message").

That is just a test I sent from my Hotmail account to my ISP account. If I hadn't doctored the headers slightly for a little anonymity when submitting to SC it would have actually picked up my IP address connecting to Hotmail and offered to report to my ISP as well.

[enigma1]

Ok got it thanks, my local mail main system is outdated but I can setup a local server and retrieve the email info in the required format.