E-mail weirdness

Your system isn't recognising what it should do with some UTF encodings. Are you corresponding with people who might be using double byte characters by any chance (Japan or China for instance)?

It is still a reasonably OK free one. I used to like F-secure from way back but presently use Bitdefender. I think Kaspersky is presently well regarded. The minor problem I see with Bitdefender is that from time to time its heuristics sometimes take against a couple of safe websites I visit regularly as false positives.

I have always thought McCoffee was the pits and I cannot understand why so many corporates use it (apart from cheap volume pricing agreements). I hate the nagware the preinstalled AVs inflict upon end users.

Malwarebytes is OK as a second opinion but it is worth having another antivirus program running as well. VirusTotal is worth using to scan anything you don't like the look of before risking opening it on your own machine. Increasingly I am seeing undetected hostile binary stuff arriving in bulk for upto 24 hours before the AV guy can catch up.

It will scan a file if you upload it or a URL and applies an ensemble of up to date AV engines to it and reports the results:

BTW Given your dislike of Win7 have you considered buying a secondhand cheap Dell office SFF PC with a WinXP license included to junk (and transplant it onto your new box on a dual boot basis?). It ought to work provided that XP can support some modes of the graphics card since the box comes from the same OEM stable (never tried to do this). The

It's only occurring with E-mails from Electronic Design, but I will run a disk scan.

Also, I have noted on widely spread occasions that Eudora garbles and runs together two E-mail. ...Jim Thompson

You're only noticing the problem in Eudora. It may be happening elsewhere depending on disk activity. I like to assume the worst and play it safe. A disk scan (for errors) will find bad sectors, but not a scrambled FAT. CHKDSK or some directory repair utility is needed.

What happens is that it loses the blank line above the header used as a message seperator. No clue on the exact cause and as you note, doesn't happen often enough for anyone to bother fixing it. I haven't seen the problem since I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have an XP box here in the office. Several in fact, all behind a firewall. These are used for the more serious bench experiments and other stuff where good reliability is needed.

True. However, the header excert was scraped from a different Penton Media message which used multipart MIME. I assumed that the ones from Electronic Design would be similar.

Nope. I deduced that it was a 4K cluster from the middle of a DLL file after stuffing it into a hex editor and obtained a few lines that looked like pieces of a symbol table. It's potentially a bad guess or pure luck, but it's the only coherent information that I was able to extract. I think the binary junk is part of a DLL or program. Also note that there were 2 email messages with blocks of binary garbage mixed in. That's kinda difficult to deliver as a single messages. Most mailers will choke on that.

Since 2/11 the only "garbled" E-mails have originated from...

No other Penton E-mails or any other E-mails, for that matter, are garbled. And all these garbled messes do say, "If you have trouble viewing this email, read the online version

(sigh) Apparently my reference was too subtle...

(or, I've missed your humor, entirely)

Another movie reference.

This time, the reference is to the Jodie Foster film "Contact".

I still have one Win98 & Win95 box (although its display card died).

There are a few things that VM cannot do where hardware is concerned.

My suggestion was that if you find Win7 too difficult to live with on the new box that you acquire a spare XP Pro license by buying a dirt cheap secondhand Dell XP box simply to get the license code.

Does the XP license inside Win7 obey the old XP aliasing rules? That might also be a solution to your dislike of smeared text.

You will obviously be stuck with the 4GB ram limit in XP.

One reson why there are some clean XP boxes here.

I have Win 7 Professional which AFAIK entitles me to a free XP license.

I've gotten used to the poor display performance of Win 7 by now :-(

It's like a squeak that can't be fixed. After a few weeks you barely hear it anymore.

That would be acceptable. The new PC has 8GB but I've never gone much above 3.5GB and most of that is likely caused by bloat in Win 7 that XP doesn't yet have (it was always happy with 2GB).

Humor? I thought you were serious as I had been? I simply built on your suggestion of the alien communication in Jim Thomson's email being a cookbook for preparing humans for alien consumption, into something more probable. In the unlikely case that you missed my methodology, my hidden agenda is to leave the reader in limbo, somewhere between wondering whether I was serious or humorous. There's a large gray area of uncertainty between these extremes, where I like to play, err... write. The difficult part is equally balancing the likely and unlikely parts in order to maximize the uncertainty. Admittedly, ambiguous but probable absurdity is an obscure form of humor, but it's what I do best.

We haven't heard from Jim Thomson since this morning, when he announced that he was going to scan his hard disk drive. Oh-oh. Maybe the aliens got him with an alien email virus (or recipe). Perhaps what he needs is an alien technology compatible computer, such as the one that Jeff Goldblum used in the movie "Independence Day" to upload a virus in their spaceship?

"Greetings citizens of planet Earth. We come in peace and have much to offer your civilization ..."

You missed my post of today at 11:06 AM MST (-0700) ?? ...Jim Thompson

I just read it. Congrats. You were lucky that it wasn't an mangled FAT or an alien virus or abduction. Did you run CHKDSK /F ?

I don't think that sending them an email will unsubscribe you from their mailing list. There should be an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each spam message and possibly a similar link on their web pile.

Any header, contains, penton, transfer to, Junk, skip rest >:-}

Annoyance removed. ...Jim Thompson