[NBLUG/talk] code: PGh0bWw+PGhlYWQ+PC9oZWFkPjxmb250IGNvbG9yPSJ3aGl0ZSI+DQo0M1BS

ME dugan at passwall.com
Sun Sep 14 00:45:01 PDT 2003


Micxz Love (lovedialup.com) said:
>
> I was looking at an email that in the body looked like so:
[chopped binhex encoded SPAM]
> "Why would someone do that?" (sic)

Using my very weak Perl Fu, I was able to copy out the Binhex encoded
stuff and put it into a file (decodeme.txt), and then issue this:

$ perl -MMIME::Base64 -0777 -ne 'print decode_base64($_)' < decodeme.txt

What I saw was *SPAM!* (Something about a web cam and asking if you want
to see someone in a web cam. You want the text, I can get it to you, or
ytou can "do it yourself" and read the spam in all of it's glory.

Why would someone do this? To try to get the SPAM passed the SPAM filters.
Many can't decode base64 to scan for spam. Also, if the spam is of
sufficient size, the bas64 encoding can make the size of the message big
enough to not be scanned due to size limits. (Yeah, I know, it is dumb.)

Anyway...

(No more spam to the list! ;-)  (heh heh)
(In case it is not obvious, the above line is a joke. You did not know
what you were sending, and I was trying to be funny. ;-)

-ME




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