junk advertising emails with strange headers
I have been getting unsolicited advertising from many vendors that all have similar headers. There is a strange character that looks like 4 zeros, 2 on top and 2 on bottom that I cannot copy to make a junk filter. It looks like it is a spacer between characters. I have been junking them manually but wonder what the characters are and how to junk them automatically. I have tried to go to the bottom of the email to unsubscribe, but the unsubscribe goes to the vendor. I am wondering what the strange character is and how to automatically dump it. I am attaching some of the headers as a jpg file.
All Replies (2)
Generally message subjects are limited to standard keyboard characters, simply because we type them. Technically they are limited to the entire range of characters in a font, and in Unicode that is thousands. However because we are talking fonts, not all fonts are created equal. Some have glyphs for every entry, others do not.
For those that know unicode and are happy with entering the hexadecimal values in a subject all sorts of weird stuff can be forced. That appears to be what is happening here. This lion and hand for example is just a character each. 🦁 ✋
Now to fix your problem. Select one of the messages and then press Ctrl+U. This will open the message source in a text editor. It is not very friendly, but you will see a line that starts with subject: what follows will be the subject including the character codes used to display the square symbol (which I think might be some sort of error symbol because the font actually has nothing or that item.) Select a portion of the subject including the codes, copy it and now you are armed with something to paste into your filter.
I hope that helps somewhat.
I found that the header was in utf8 and tried to find the characters. This sent me down a rabbit hole looking for utf-8 and ascii numbers with no success. Then I read the email using webmail and discovered that all the addresses except mine were bogus and there was html at the bottom of the message that looked like the vendors web page. At the bottom, there was a nice link to unsubscribe. I assume this guy wanted my email address or something, which I gave him whenever I tried to unsubsribe. I don't know how to report this problem. Here is the html at the bottom of the headers.
Subject: =?UTF-8?B?VS4AUwAuIEF1ZABpAG8AbG9naXMAdHMgUmUAdgBlYWwgdABoAGlzIA==?=
=?UTF-8?B?U2UAY3JlAHQgdABvIFRyAGVhAHRpbmcgSGUAYXJpbgBnIExvAHMAcw==?=
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <2049997648798609.035814294.541054@upsphn.com> X-CMAE-Envelope: MS4xfHFTGFlZ1nhBCfNNf3U9Xu2fFeiJDG+Me+sqVfaN7erlp0gM7ejlRAO7Lu37x0ehiYChskcEL8uGTYngLlmbVtyBYAu6ZtOynLjIumfqLCRRhemZUWKZ
2fpPiFu4k7eWQ8cteG5OMz6KR+LPNYn9zzSHmVGTwtIzhzkE2HVi+TNICZQqOWc0VuBxIk4QU2WuVg==
vykya09124kgvbuv2962edhax