=?utf-8?q? in sender field (2003)

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This is more a general email question than an Outlook question, but I didn’t see a forum that was more appropriate. (Maybe a moderator could move it to a better spot if there is one.)

The question regards spam. Every day I get at least 2 or 3 spams with the following in the sender field: =?utf-8?q??= (substituting a proper name for ). Sometimes the same string appears in the subject line, sometimes not. But the string is always the same. I’m just curious: what the heck is that all about? These all seem to be unrelated, from different email addresses.

These aren’t any more of a problem than any other spam, but I would just like to know where that odd string of characters comes from.

Fafner.

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I’m guessing as I don’t get this kind – but its a UTF-8 encoding that is not being encoded or decoded properly. I pick the ? is an “escape” character

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8%5B/url%5D

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As a matter of interest, are you or your ISP running any kind of spam filtering or tagging software?

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As a matter of interest, are you or your ISP running any kind of spam filtering or tagging software?

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Just came across this reference to Doing the Splits – scroll down to near the bottom to find it.
I’m not sure I exactly understand, but is described as “Splitting the subject line by using an encoding a bogus line breaks” – whatever that means!

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Thanks for your replies. I looked at both the urls you provided, but I can’t say I understood either of them, although at least now I know I am not dreaming this up. In answer to Leif, the ISP for the email account that is getting these is Earthlink. There is a spam filter at work, but many of these make it through. I don’t know if any are caught, because I have the filter set to immediately delete “known spam,” so I never see it. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way of setting the spam filter to catch all of them. I can block only whole addresses or domains. Naturally, I have a rule in Outlook to filter them out, though.

Fafner

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I got the impression (from the link I posted) that not only is it an unintentional error made by the composer of the spam, but it is only recently (from the beginning of this month) being sent. Doubtless the spammers will soon realise the error of their ways and revert to less obvious subject lines…

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Just came across this reference to Doing the Splits – scroll down to near the bottom to find it.
I’m not sure I exactly understand, but is described as “Splitting the subject line by using an encoding a bogus line breaks” – whatever that means!

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