Just Plain Annoying, SC

[emanmb]

Been reporting for years to SC and come to forums now and then but now, either Yahoo or SC has changed the way they deal w/the headers in Yahoo reports so that I get the message:

"error: couldn't parse head

Message body parser requires full, accurate copy of message

More information on this error..

no links found"

Yes I read the more information page and NO I am not gonna sit there doing indentations in headers I barely understand as it is for every freakin spam in my yahoo box. It's enough work already to fwd spam, I figure I'm doing a "good thing", but any more work than what you see in my video is above and beyond.

Calgon take me away! Isn't there an easy button for this nonsense?

[Farelf]

Oh, good grief, not again. I've just confirmed that it's still working for me, in Windows, in Yahoo Classic or whatever it's called (haven't tried the 'New mail'), using the Ctrl-Forward combination which you don't have on your Mac. Somewhat hampered by my ISP not letting me send actual spam to anyone, not even forwarded as an attachment to SC - but an old "straight" message seemed to parse OK, going straight to "Cancelled reporting".

We need a user more familiar with your set up. Seems similar to the line wrapping problem you can get with any system.

Anyway, moving this to "Reporting Help" with this post so others, including SC staff, are more likely to see it. Good luck!

[emanmb]

In the video, what you see is me;

Open email,

right click to get menu for full headers,

select all,

copy,

close window,

paste at top of FWD,

add addresses,

send.

Safari and Firefox seem to copy things differently where in Safari I'll get all the links, colors of text etc. to transfer in a copy/paste and FF will give plain text only.

The issue with my wrap/cut/paste whatever one calls it occurs with both browsers, in OS X and frankly I don't see much if any difference from what appears in Yahoo's popup window and what I paste.

This is the 'new' Yahoo and one can right click to bring up the menu and select full headers. The few spams that make it into my email client can of course be changed to the text encoding or whatever you call it when html is all that can be seen in the email and SC has no probs with that.

[emanmb]

OK now this applies to hotmail reports as well and is dang annoying.

I have to right click the email in hotmail, get the source, cut and paste, THEN I have to remove the double spacing from the headers so SC can even begin to read it. OK so I've accepted that as a necessary evil but now getting 'can't parse header' BS for that report and the spam site links in the email go unreported.

Why does SC have to make it so hard to make a report from common everyday yahoo and hotmail webmail sites? Can anything be done to broaden the range of readable headers?

[Farelf]

...Why does SC have to make it so hard to make a report from common everyday yahoo and hotmail webmail sites? Can anything be done to broaden the range of readable headers?

Good question but in the meantime I'm not seeing that double spacing of the headers thing.

Well, I couldn't see any headers at all apart from the trivial ones anymore ("Internet Explorer cannot download ..." something) but that was 'solved' by

Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> HTTP 1.1 settings (nearly half-way down) Uncheck "Use HTTP 1.1"

That restored the status quo of being able to right-click on the unopened message, select "View message source" and have the whole thing pop up in a new tab (in IE8). I've checked, that copies and pastes flawlessly into the webpage submission box.

Might be worth trying? You have different symptoms, a different implementation of Hotmail I think but it is easily done and easily reversed if it achieves nothing. You need to re-start your browser (if you had it open) after unchecking that box for the change to be effective. I have no idea what magic HTTP 1.1 achieves but neither I nor anyone else using that fix has yet noticed anything different. Except "View message source" works properly again. The MS help forum which deals with the topic is slightly broken, vita brevis, mors loga (page change not working), as further testament to their mastery of their chosen medium.

Oops forgot - you don't have Control panel ... do you have HTTP 1.1 enabled somewhere? We need a Macintosh user to help out here.

[emanmb]

I think this forum answers that question that 1, it's not possible and 2, what this guy said-->"HTTP 1.1 has been the standard version of HTTP for years. It was introduced back in 1999. Keep in mind, the first version of Safari came out in 2003. I doubt it supports, or ever supported, older versions of HTTP. They're that obsolete."

If it was as simple as checking/unchecking a box, OK. I don't wanna spend another minute deciphering Geekanese just so I can report spam effectively, not that your post was at all difficult Farelf. But I spend enough time trying to do just that already.

What would be nice is if SC could just be able to interpret the well intentioned reports in the formats we can provide without the user having to do backflips to do so.

[rconner]

Extra lines is a symptom of cross-platform text problems (specifically, line endings which are traditionally different on Windows/DOS, old Mac OS, and Unix (including Mac OS X)). For some time, I had a similar problem with Apple Mail; when you copied the raw source of mail then pasted into SC it would develop blank lines. As a stopgap, I found that I could paste the text into a text editor, then recopy and paste it into SC. The particular editor I used somehow fixed the line ending problems.

Whatever the problem in Apple Mail may have been, it seems to have been fixed, since I don't have this trouble since having upgraded the OS.

HTTP1.1 is the current version of HTTP (for the past 11 yrs or so, remarkable stability). This is what SpamCop uses to serve you pages (I just checked using cURL). I think all the browsers (including Safari) are on board with this. Doesn't seem logical that HTTP incompatibilities would cause this problem, but who knows?

-- rick

[Farelf]

...What would be nice is if SC could just be able to interpret the well intentioned reports in the formats we can provide without the user having to do backflips to do so.

Yeah, Safari-Hotmail should be supported, all major mail sources should be supported. When they are not, maintaining or expanding a representative reporter base is compromised (as is the ability to even evaluate the size potential of those sources).

Rick, yeah, you're right, HTTP 1.1 shouldn't be a cause. It is almost unbelievable that reversion solves the IE8-Hotmail "View message source" problem, but that is a different thing by the look of it, something slipshod in the development of Hotmail and the handling of .aspx files.

Which reminds me, must nip over to http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11484 and add a note that a work-around for "that other setting" is HTTP reversion. Ludicrous but true.

[emanmb]

Extra lines is a symptom of cross-platform text problems (specifically, line endings which are traditionally different on Windows/DOS, old Mac OS, and Unix (including Mac OS X)). For some time, I had a similar problem with Apple Mail; when you copied the raw source of mail then pasted into SC it would develop blank lines. As a stopgap, I found that I could paste the text into a text editor, then recopy and paste it into SC. The particular editor I used somehow fixed the line ending problems.

I never had a problem getting the source code accurately from Mac Mail. [command>option>U] Presently it's only web mail from hotmail and yahoo that's at issue for me.

Hotmail opens a new window with the source code double spaced (thank you very much) and yahoo will only give you headers, so if there is an html only spam in yahoo, the body will be empty in the FWD and SC won't accept that at all. That is definitely a weak point of yahoo insofar as spam reporting goes.