Weird email behavior - what is this??

Okay, I received an email that displays the first several lines of a previously read email in the message body. For example, if I read message A, then click on the Suspicious Email, the first lines from message A appears in the Suspicious Email. If I then click on message B, and then again on Suspicious Email, the first lines of message B appears in the Suspicious Email. If I look under Properties, Message Body, I can see the original message as being one of those “Your m o r tgage has been blahblahblah” types.

There was no attachment. I use Outlook Express, reading/sending email as plain text. Computer OS is WinXP, Service Pack 2, firewalled, with F-Prot as the antivirus program. I update OS, AVP every night, and then run the antivirus program. F-Prot has not reported any viruses. I’ve also been checking the Registry to see if there are any new unknown processes, especially under Run and RunOnce (Local_Machine).

Has anyone heard of this kind of email mischief? I googled and searched AVP/CERT sites to no avail. (I’ve also sent an email to my college’s director of IT but haven’t heard anything yet.)
:confused:

Sounds more like the spam email has some weird formatting that is showing up a bug in Outlook. It’s not refreshing the message box properly. Spammers often try all sorts of jiggery-pokery formatting in their emails to try to disguise themselves from filters while still being legible to the intended target. Viewing in plain text you’ll not get the ‘benefit’ of this.

What you’re seeing might be deliberate on the spammers part, but more likely an unforseen bug.

I think you may be right, Futile Gesture. Everyone that I’ve talked with today seems unfamiliar with this.

Oh well, at least I’ve found a few more bits of crapola on my machine that I’ve been able to clean out. Thanks for your reply!