[NTLUG:Discuss] Bizzare email behavior in Mozilla.

[Chris Cox]

Tom Adelstein wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 17:01 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> Chris et al,
> 
> This bizzare email is making the rounds. It doesn't matter what mail
> user agent you're using -- you get an email that will not download and
> it stops the remote queue from delivering. Mine has been from my local
> ISP's mail service.

Send me a copy.

I get hundreds of spam messages a day... never had this one.