[ale] Mystery Spam

[Fletch]

>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> writes:

    Jeff> I guess where my confusion lies is this: How did Evolution
    Jeff> know to perform the base64 decode for that text?  Does it
    Jeff> (and other mail clients, I'd presume) look for some sort of
    Jeff> characteristic "smell" in its message text?

There's a number of headers (such as Content-Transfer-Encoding) and
other formatting which contain metadata that let MIME-aware
applications know what's in the message.  For more info see:


http://www.mhonarc.org/~ehood/MIME/


which has links to the relevant RFCs.

-- 
Fletch                | "If you find my answers frightening,       __`'/|
fletch at phydeaux.org   |  Vincent, you should cease askin'          \ o.O'
770 294-0820 (m)      |  scary questions." -- Jules                =(___)=
                      |                                               U