[NTLUG:Discuss] Bizzare email behavior in Mozilla.

[Chris Cox]

Steve Baker wrote:
> I'm reading email in Mozilla (and SuSE 9.1) and recently - about once
> every day or two - I get an email in some foreign character set that
> (if I inadvertantly display it) takes about 10 minutes to download
> via DSL, locks up Mozilla completely while it's downloading and
> finally starts 'infecting' the text labels in Mozilla's menues and
> prompts so that they too are displayed in the font of the message.
> 
> When the message finally appears, it's some typical piece of HTML
> spam.
> 
> I have to shut down Mozilla to restore normal font behavior - and
> while the message is downloading, the only way to stop it is to
> open another window and do a killall -9 mozilla!!
> 
> Generally, I delete these messages without displaying them - and
> most of the time, Mozilla's baysian filters trap them - so this only
> affects me once in a great while.
> 
> But being a Linux user and generally supremely oblivious of viruses and
> other such nastiness coming via email, this is a bit of a shock to
> the system.
> 
> So - lots of questions:
> 
> 1) What the heck it is doing to my fonts?  It seems like this
>    must be a Mozilla bug.
> 
> 2) Is there a way in Mozilla to automatically filter out messages
>    that use a particular character set?  After all, if I can't
>    understand it, I might as well filter it.
> 
> 3) Why is there no way to interrupt this thing while it's eating
>    all of my time/bandwidth?

My advice (not sure of your exact problem though)....

Turn off (for Mail and Newsgroups):

HTML in email
Remote image loading
Java/Javascript
Disable plugins

Not sure if this will help, but good things to do anyhow.