H-J (was PERL or PYTHON?)

Tom Mitchell mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Mon Dec 22 20:08:52 UTC 2003


On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hello Chris,
> 
> > Just by cleaning out the original text and addresses and
> > everything that is seen is not the way to do it. Also, do you
> > mean that there are still hidden headers in the original
> > message that are retained and direct the message? and that's
> > how and why it's considered hijack(ed)?!?
> 
>  Indeed. In particular the In-Reply-To: header which is used to
> sort mails by thread.

Most mailers have a 'show headers' option in the viewer.

I have attached some of the header lines from the previous
message for inspection.  You can see the "In-Reply-To:" header.  
It is possible to build a linked list of messages (a thread)  
from the information in the header lines:

 Message-ID: <3FE737FD.9984.1344B1 at localhost>
 References: <3FE4F91A.5040009 at xs4all.nl>
 In-reply-to: <1072111250.2118.13.camel at redhat90> 

Look at the header lines in my reply, compare and contrast.

Some threading tools can show multiple threads if there are
multiple replies to a single message.  Some threading tools
simply watch the Subject and or the Date lines.  Some mail and
news readers can kill a thread or flag your interest in a thread.

Anyhow if you want to start a clean "new thread" compose a new
message, not a reply to an existing one.  I do not know of a tool
that lets you kill the "In-Reply-To:" header.  Does anyone?

=== snip old headers ===
 Received: from hnexfe08.hetnet.nl (hnexfe08.hetnet.nl [195.121.6.174])
        by mx1.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id hBMHTNA28861
        for <fedora-list at redhat.com>; Mon, 22 Dec 2003 12:29:23 
-0500  Received: from localhost ([62.166.41.135]) by hnexfe08.hetnet.nl with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5. 0.2195.5329);  Mon, 22 Dec 2003 18:29:17 +0100 F
 From: "Leonard den Ottolander" <leonardjo at hetnet.nl>
 To: fedora-list at redhat.com
 MIME-Version: 1.0
 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
 Subject: Re: Hijacking (was PERL or PYTHON?)
 Message-ID: <3FE737FD.9984.1344B1 at localhost>
 Priority: normal
 References: <3FE4F91A.5040009 at xs4all.nl>
 In-reply-to: <1072111250.2118.13.camel at redhat90>
 X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c)
 X-OriginalArrivalTime: 22 Dec 2003 17:29:17.0657 (UTC) FILETIME=[20809490:01C3C8B1]
 X-loop: fedora-list at redhat.com
 Sender: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com
 Errors-To: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com
 X-BeenThere: fedora-list at redhat.com
 X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13
 Precedence: junk
 Reply-To: fedora-list at redhat.com
 List-Help: <mailto:fedora-list-request at redhat.com?subject=help>
 List-Post: <mailto:fedora-list at redhat.com>
 List-Subscribe: <http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list>,
=== end snip old headers ===

It is good to get in the habit of looking at headers. Spam and
other mail badness can be deduced from headers (including MIME
headers). Some headers can be used to discover if the message was
'strange'.  If you suspect a bad message isolate the message for
a couple days so the virus detector guys can catch up. Looking at
the "Received: from" lines and other mail meta data is often
telling. 

Nifty HTML mail can contain lines that fetch one pixel encoded
images that will verify that you 'saw' the message.  For spammers
this is gold and is only part of the reason that most unix guys
HATE html.  Save a spam message and inspect it with a pure text
tool like less, more, pg, view... to see what I mean.  Look for
lines like:
   
  http://us.click.bohoo.com/CODE/NOCLICKME/NOTHANKS/FLATWRONG/FU17417k55j5

If you have looked at such a message there may be little
additional harm in looking at the individual lines again one at a
time in your browser. You can then see see how the message was
concocted and sniff out what it is doing.  After looking at a
couple bad-guy messages you will begin to hate HTML too.

I wonder if my HTML comment and subject line changes screwed up
this thread.  The HJ word in the original subject line may have
already made it impossible for us to board a travel conveyance
this holiday.  I would like to avoid that....

Look into elm, pine, Mail, mail, and other pure text mail tools.
Some co-exist with GUI tools, some GUI tools co-exist with text
tools.  You can test setups and interactions with a dummy user on
your machine.

Regards,
TomM

PS:
N.B. (note well) the list management lines.
The List-Help line is especially helpful.

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l
	mitch48 -a*t- yahoo-dot-com





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