It's getting to be a real pain to use email anymore and it's not just the Spam and Viruses, it also screwy fonts. I've been getting periodic emails which I have to assume are Spam (but don't really know for sure) that lock up my email programs. The offending emails are coming from t-online.de and have strange subjects like "=?Windows-1251?B?0u7t608PP++ejllPju8PL7IM/0wsXQIMTGyMw=?=". Outlook Express hangs up when it trys to retrieve such a message and they're a pain to eliminate.

The only thing I've been able to determine is that these emails are using Windows-1251 Cyrillic encoding. If you do a search on Google for Windows-1251 you'll see what looks to be Russian. So what's the deal? If you're a spammer, then why not spam in a language that the receiptient can at least understand. I don't read Russian, Chinese and can only muddle my way through French and Spanish.

The only thing I've been able to do with this crap is to delete it while it's on my server using an old version of the PopCorn email program. However, even using this program, I can't attempt a retrieval of the email or it'll lock it up too. Popcorn can be obtained from http://untrafunk.com. The latest version of this program only allows you to check one email account if you're using it in the free mode. However, this maybe the ticket you need to eliminate a hung email account.