Why do people send gibberish?

Okay, if you received an email with the "Subject" line like in the screenshot - would you actually open it? The screenshots are from MailWasher and I examined the header.

Does any of that junk actually mean anything? (Yes, I'm bored). Pete

 

Second screenshot

 

I wouldn't have seen it since my filters would have passed it to the trash bin.

It's using traditional Chinese character set (gb2312). Your mail reader doesn't have Chinese fonts so it displays "gibberish." If you opened it in IE and installed the Chinese Language pack you would see it encoded in Chinese characters.

I receive emails from different Asian friends and the Asian language characters in the headers display that way. Example from Korea:

---------------------------------
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=euc-kr
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
--------------------------------


http://www.rsjones.net/imgs/yhee1.gif

The Message Index shows the body of the message both as text/plain and text/HTML.

My email program (Agent) is a text-based reader and displays Base64 encoding as an HTML attachment and inline as plain text.

For security reasons I read HTML messages as plain text (no code will run), but If I want to, I can switch to "view HTML code" in the message window (useful for examining phishing messages), or launch the Agent icon at the bottom of the message to open in the browser (Opera) as HTML.

http://www.rsjones.net/imgs/yhee2.gif

The "gibberish" at the bottom, similar to what you received, are Korean characters (not decoded) inserted by yahoo.co.kr advertising yahoo mail.

However, I have several Asian Language Packs installed in IE so that visitors here can read email from their friends using their web mail.

If I open the email in OE, the Korean characters display correctly:

http://www.rsjones.net/imgs/yhee4.gif

Sorry you are bored... try this:

http://www.csmonitor.com/homeforum/sudoku.html


-rich

 

Hello,
I get these sometimes, depending on the language people send their mails in. Usually, you get the funky characters for non-Latin languages. Personally it pisses me off - using computer not in English.
Mrk

 

So people have no right to communicate in their own language?

What about people who communicate in poor English?

 

Hello,
Computer is made for English communication. Coding languages - English.
Poor English is still English - Latin letters, no problem with encoding.
Mrk

 

You are joking, right? If not, you should hold your head in shame.

 

Really, really, very, very bored??

http://www.fileformat.info/info/charset/GB2312/decode.htm

 

I should hold my head in compatibility.
I'm not a native English speaker, first of all. Second, for the sake of compatibility and coding, only one form of characters should be used. The same way heraldry language is French. The right of the first.
Mrk

 

Hi Mrk,

If you go to the Korean yahoo site I referred to,

http://kr.mobile.yahoo.com/

You will see it's displayed in Korean (gibberish if you don't have Korean fonts installed).

But look at the source coding:


-------------------
DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"

title>¾ßÈÄ!¸ð¹ÙÀÏ ¹«¼±ÇÖÅ° "9090" GoGo! title>
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=euc-kr">
LINK REL='stylesheet' TYPE='text/css' HREF='http://img.yahoo.co.kr/globalnav/ykr_glob2.css'
link href="http://mobile.pimg.kr.yahoo.com/2005/11/css/mobile_css01.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
script src="http://kr.mobile.yahoo.com/js/v30/ykm.js" script
style type="text/css"

--------------------

It's coded in English except for what will display on the web page in Korean - the Title of the page in this example.

Notice that the header of the message Spy posted is coded in English. It's the subject and body/text that is in the Chinese Character set.

Email we receive like that was not sent by someone we know, rather, spam or other - so we need to separate what is compatible internationally, and what is intended locally.

As long as there are separate languages, people in different countries should be able to write email and set up web pages for viewing in their own language based on an agreed-upon compatible coding language to be interpreted by browsers and email programs.

-rich

 

Hello,
I did not mean anything fascist - purely syntax-ic and the matter of lower level language vs higher level language. That's all.
Mrk

 

I thought these emails were made with a funny typewriter