Melinda > wrote:
>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?

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.

>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.

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.

>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?

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.

>Maybe something to do with those protests?

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

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."