Ray said:
I am working with our Firewall support as we try to be mor successful
in reducing the amount of spam we're getting. They asked for a sample
of the spam messages. In the past, I have always been able to use the
"forward as Attachment" option in outlook. This time, I'm having to
use a web form and I just saved the attachments, then uploaded them.
Support is asking me if I can "provide the sample emails in
source/text format". Can I? and if so - what do I do?
I've looked in Outlook help a bit Google some, but I can come up with
anything that looks like it applies...
For the body of the e-mail, copy and paste it into the web form. If it
is HTML formatted, right-click in the body and view source and then
copy and paste that. For the headers, use the View -> Options menu.
As an alternative, you might want to use the Pocketknife Peek add-on.
This doesn't add any more than what you can dig out from Outlook but
just makes it handier. It also shows what was saved in Outlook's
message store which may not exactly match what was sent (see below).
Be aware that Outlook will rearrange and delete headers in received
e-mails when you forward the original e-mail as an attachment. What
was received may not be exactly what got stored after Outlook slices up
the e-mail to store as records in its message database file. For more
info on this, see the post titled "Outlook users please read" (I
removed all her asterisks in the Subject) posted by Ellen in the
spamcop newsgroup. If your NNTP server doesn't carry the Spamcop
newsgroups, you can connect to their NNTP server (news.spamcop.net).
What Outlook shows you is *not* exactly what it received; however, it
should be more than close enough to use when reporting spam.
Perhaps the reason that the support team went with a web form to report
spam is that Outlook will reorder the Received headers when forwarding
the spam e-mail as an attachment. As Ellen (who is a SpamCop
representative) states, "Outlook does *not* include full and accurate
headers when you forward spams as attachments. It reorders the Received
headers, which makes them untrustworthy, as well as deleting/not
forwarding other headers including X-headers, which is of less
importance but which may loose some valuable information needed by
ISPs/hosting companies. The result of the 'scrambled" or reordered
Received headers means that SpamCop does not reliably know where the
injection point of the spam is." That what you can see of the raw
source of a received e-mail in Outlook may not be exactly what you
received is a long-known problem and sometimes a user is suggested to
use Outlook Express or another e-mail client other than Outlook to look
at the raw source of an e-mail.
