Reporting spam fails due to: This email contains no date

[ndro5]

Some spam that I wanted to report to SpamCop got struck in the automatic processing with the message "This email contains no date".

In an email discussion with a SpamCop admin it turned out, that the Received line contains some characters which deter proper evaluation.

I am using the view message source feature of thunderbird 11.0.1 for pasting the complete spam into the web-form. The issue occurs as well on a linux and a win xp installation.

My email address contains an underscore (_ what is =5f in utf). Submitting works, when I edit the Received line and change

=?utf-8?q?<who=5fcares[at]web.de>;?=

into

<who_cares[at]web.de>;

Forwarding as attachment doesn't seem to make any difference.

In some cases a received line has line breaks and it looks like this:

Received: from [...] by mx-ha.web.de (mxweb102)

with ESMTP (Nemesis) id [...] for =?utf-8?q?<who=5fcare?=

=?utf-8?q?s[at]web.de>;?= Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:23:26 +0200

This ?= before the date causes the problem.

It might be an issue of my german mail provider, but for integrity of evidence SpamCop should be enabled to deal with such encodings.

For reference look at this TRACKING URL:

http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z5298353747z8...8f029fd3001a2az

Regards

ndro5

[Farelf]

Yes, I see the problem. You have put a lot of work into finding and documenting the problem - thanks!

Looks like someone in the route of your mail hosting (mx-ha.web.de?) has a bungled character translation configuration (which somehow doesn't interfere with passing on the message) - maybe others here have a better notion. Do you get many like this?

I can't see how there is anything in your mail client setup that might fix it (such as default character encoding for display) but, as said, others may know better. It might be as well if you reply with the name of your e-mail client and the current default encoding just in case. I wouldn't hold out much hope of SC parsing being amended to deal with mixed encoding issues, but I am more than a little vague on the technical issues. You might, instead, need to talk to web.de as you supposed - it is unlikely they know this is happening but I have a feeling they wouldn't much care so long as it doesn't interfere with their operations.