[wellylug] malicious code in email?

[V K]

> This morning I noticed that the inbox on my home kmail [suse 7.3] contained
> a message with sender and subject "unknown".  The preview window showed a
> long [1000 character] alphanumeric string.  The message was in a group of
> email that had arrived four or five days ago.  When I tried to delete it,
> the message remained in the inbox but the adjacent message was deleted.
> When moved to the trash folder, the deleted message assumes the same form as
> the malicious one, ie sender and subject "unknown" with a body consisting of
> a alphanumeric string.

My biggest gripe about kmail is that it is politically correct, i.e.
behaves like the standards require. No problem with that, the problem
starts because kmail makes absolutely zero effort to go beyoind that
and try to interoperate with the other ten zillion email apps out
there. Assuming that most email clients are non-conforming to standards
in a strict way, kmail won't be able to process the majority of emails
you get. Does that strike you as a useful application??

In this case: kmail displays a sender as "unknown" if there is no From:
header in the msg. One could take it from the "From " line instead, but
that would be against the ideology. kmail's support for mbox-type mail
folders is at beast lousy. There are some problems associated with mbox
folders, most of which solvable (as other email clients like mutt
show), but some solutions require non-standardised (albeit very common)
extensions. That's where your multiple-emails-combined into one come in
(keyword Content-length:). kmail decides to be politically correct,
and instead of trying to handle most of those emails correctly it
handles none of them instead.

Bottom line: kmail will simply not handle those emails. Use another
email client, and with a bit of luck, another client will save the
emails back in a form which kmail can handle (no guarantee though).

I am still looking for a really good GUI email client too...

> The email came down through the Paradise ISP.

Irrelevant here.

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann			is possibly list0570 with the domain in header
http://volker.orcon.net.nz/		Please do not CC list postings to me.


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