Not Yet Rant

[freyakitten]

It has now been one week and two days since I sent emails to my ISP support asking them to:
a) fix the problem I have with getting other people's emails
b) fix the problem I have with getting emails with attachments containing viruses sent from people who exist only half the time
c) strip all attachments from incoming emails - related to b)
d) fix the problem I have which is, I think, someone else using my email address to send messages like b) from. I found this when a different ISP checked an email ostensibly sent from my address and found that the attachment had a virus, so sent it back to me.

I've received the autoresponder messages telling me that they've received my emails, but since then there has been no response.

The last time I had to ask them something it took two days to reply so they must be very busy. I'll give them another week and then I'll enquire oh so sweetly about the missing response.

Comments

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Delay might be because some of that is very difficult for them to do, in particular (d).

Most of the current crop of viruses forge the 'sender' information when they mail themselves, because it makes it harder to track down the source. What they'll do is pick names out of their victim's address book - somebody who knows you gets infected, and the virus sends messages to their friends pretending to be you.

There's not a lot your ISP can do about this one. If the viruses are sent from another of their customers they can shut it down (I know Optus make a habit of this, my wife gets to field irate calls from those who've lost their service), but chances are the infected machines are elsewhere.

The most effective way I've found of dealing with it is to get an email client with a good trainable filtering system. After a little bit of training, mine catches virtually all spam and viruses and diverts them straight to a 'Junk' folder. Every so often I skim through it quickly to make sure it hasn't caught any real mail by mistake (hasn't done in weeks) and then delete en masse. It still means I have to download the wretched stuff, but it makes it very easy to get rid of it.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

I'm currently running Eudora, which filters based on matching criteria which you specify. I use filters extensively to sort out the important stuff from the emails that can wait a few days. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you can't filter based on attachments which is what I want since the common filters I use won't work, and few people send me attachments except for family:
1) Sender - since I refuse to have an address book on my PC, I can't filter for unknown addresses. Although certain senders on certain lists get sent straight to the Trash because they persistantly refuse to use spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
2) Subject - doesn't work since the titles of my most common virus-mails are considerably the same as certain messages I receive from classmates
3) It won't (as far as I can tell) filter for message body length of less than 2 lines.

What I'm grumpiest about is that I haven't been contacted again (now three weeks after initial contact), even an autoresponse saying "Thankyou for contacting us, we're working on your problem but there is no progress to report yet" would be nice.

It makes me feel as if I don't exist. Which I know I do, but their customer service is usually much better.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain - it's been a long time since I used Eudora, but I think it's possible to filter for attachments. Any message with an attachment contains a string that identifies that attachment - otherwise the mailer would treat the whole thing as text - and so you can filter based on those strings. There are some mailers that only give you the option of filtering on Subject or Sender headers; you need one that allows you to filter on 'Any Header', 'Content-Type', and/or 'Anywhere In Message'.

A message with an attachment will contain something like this:

'Content-Type: multipart/mixed;' or
'Content-Type: multipart/alternative;'

If you're happy to kill all attachments, filtering on 'Content-Type: multipart' should do the job.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Oh, filtering on multipart/alternative might also screen out messages sent in HTML, which you probably don't want. Try filtering on multipart/mixed to start with, and see how that works.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

Well, I entered the filter, now it's downloading my email - lets see how it works. Update in 10 minutes.

Thanks for the help, Lederhosen.

One of the reasons I use Eudora, by the way, (apart from ease of use, and NOT opening attachments automatically) is that it's the email program my ISP distributes as part of their package, so most of their users use a standardised program. It makes it easier for them to answer questions.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

10 minutes, my hat!

Well, filtering for multi/mixed, and it managed to only filter the 'response' messages from LJ telling me about the previous two messages in this thread!

Trying ditto to see how that goes, and if it doesn't work the way I want it, will try further permutations until it either works or I'll ask for more help.

Thanks again, Lederhosen.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Odd, my LJ notifications come through as multi-part/mixed...

Hmm. There is an option for whether you want LJ email to come through as HTML or plain. I've got HTML switched off, so if you've got it switched on that might be the difference.

In that case, you'll need to use "show message source" on the offending messages and look at their content-type header. If it's the same as legitimate messages, things get trickier.

There looks to be some good info on Eudora spam-filtering here, though I'm not in a position to test it for myself.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

Yay! Checked the website you suggested and the filter _worked_!

Bounce bounce bounce...