Mixed-up Email Messages

[eetest]

Occasionally, I will have user who reports a series of new messages in
which the FROM and SUBJECT lines are blank. In the body of one of the
letters is the raw text of part of an email message, say the boundy
line for an attachment followed by the raw mime encoded attachment. The
body looks like this:

------=_NextPart_000_00BD_01C6E260.28294950
Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;
name="2007 sales detailed by part.xls"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="2007 sales detailed by part.xls"

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAjgAAAAAAAAAA
EAAAkAAAAAEAAAD+////AAAAAIsAAACPAAAA////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
....

The next message will contain the remainder of encoding in the headers
(viewed by selecting view and options in the message window of Outlook)
and in the body. The next message will have the end of the attachment
and the headers of a new email message in its body.

It's as if Oultook has become confused regarding the boundries in a
message and slaps sections together anyway it wants.

I have done some investigating and it appear that the first letter, in
this jumbled series of messages, is spam.

I suspect that the spammer has intentionally malformed his message to
evade filtering by blurring the boundries within a message, especially
boundries for attachments. This leads to Outlook going beyond the
malformed attachment, well into other messages, to find a proper end.
This then leaves Outlook lost in the middle of a legitimate email and
trying to make sense as best it can.

Has anyone had similar experiences? What can be done about it?

 

[Brian Tillman]

Occasionally, I will have user who reports a series of new messages in
which the FROM and SUBJECT lines are blank. In the body of one of the
letters is the raw text of part of an email message, say the boundy
line for an attachment followed by the raw mime encoded attachment.
The body looks like this:

What you describe is an artifact of something wrong on the sender's end,
especially if you are getting two messages, each of which is showing a
portion of the original message. It's not your problem.