[NTLUG:Discuss] Bizzare email behavior in Mozilla.

[Tom Adelstein]

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.

If you have access to your mail through the web, you can delete
everything but your white list. If you don't know the sender, consider
deleting those emails also.

Make sure your clear the trash.

Restart your local email client (you may have to do this more that
once). I use evolution and after closing it had to find the processes
still running (ps aux |grep evolution) and kill those.

Restart the mail client, start your download and it should sync back up.

This has gone on for several days. It will eventually stop.

Cheers

-- 
Tom Adelstein <adelste at yahoo.com>