Re: OT- Spam in Chinese

Hi Ian, I do have the language pack installed in my system as far as I know, but the body of the e-mails I received are not in a form wherer I can copy and paste them it doesn't look like. I mean that the lines won't copy...I can copy the entire image but it doesn't paste correctly into Babelfish...does that make sense? The reason these are interesting to me is that I don't use my regular E-mail for anything but legitimate commerce (i.e. no spammer "should" have gotten ahold of it) and the E-mails appeard to be messages or missives of some kid, there are no graphics, logos or brand names in English. They are, however, all from Yahoo addresses. The Babelfish translation of the first E-mail's subject line is " The Beijing police station news spokesperson answers reporter the questions " and the second is the same and the third's subject is " Do not have student's idea! ! " so...pretty weird huh?

Maybe something to do with those protests?

Melinda

Your e-mail appears unmunged in the header of this message, which means spammers have gotten hold of it. Even if they hadn't, a 'bot could have easily come up with it.

It sounds like spam to me.

Well that's weird. I did a search via google for the subject of the first two and came up with a symbol for symbol identical news release (about the protests) on a news site...I was able to figure it out because I was using Google to translate the page. Next question is how in the heck did it get into my inbox...could be a certain government is collecting E-mails of people writing other people in country- but using them then for political spam??

Bizarre.

Anyway, sorry to derail you all..but I figured the best place to ask if someone read Chinese was a tea group, after all... Melinda

The e-mail I use for posting here is not the E-mail addy I'm referring to, but I see your point.

Turn off all the HTML crap on your mailer, so that you are viewing the raw message source. Most of the time you will see a bunch of stuff in big-5 character set if it's from Taiwan.

The vast majority of spam that I receive is in Korean, but I do occasionally get Big-5 spam. Most of the spam I get from China is in English and is specifically targetting overseas folks.

Spammers get addresses. You throw a business card in a bin at the office supply store, and it gets in their database, and they sell it to a spammer. Some spammer tries a dictionary attack on random letter sequencies, they find your address, they sell it. Next thing you know you're on a list.

I have an address that I used to post to Usenet a lot in the mid-nineties. It got on the Millions CD, one of the early spammer lists. That address was closed out years ago, but I still get hundreds of attempts to deliver mail from Korea to that address every day.

No more weird than most of the English language spam I get. You'll find the Yahoo addresses are forged... look at the first Received: line in the header and see where it _really_ came from. Don't ever believe the From: field in spam.

Who knows? The Chinese are increasingly cracking down on access to web sites that the government there does not approve of, but they may find it harder to scan for subversive e-mail.

--scott

I have received commercial e-mail in French ever since I put a French translation of the FAQ on my tea page. It usually amuses me.