And a third: bad setup of the spam mailer (which I understand has some special settings that get updated by mail from 'mother' from time to time). I have never seen a spam mailer so consider this hearsay. Some spam I get has so bad a MIME encapsulation that it appears as plain text.

I think you'll find this is likely. I work for a company that's been doing a lot of research in to anti-spam techniques as well as research into what kind of spam software there is out there. As a result I've seen a lot of spam software lately. It's surreal to see software with checkbox labels like "optimize against SpamAssassin" and "avoid AOL filters." I've learned that while spamming software makes sending filter-avoiding spam easier than ever, it's quite hard to use for many people, especially the intellectually devoid spammer. One thing you will find after studying spam for a while is that spammers have *terrible* quality control. I've seen so many spam that have been sent out with things like {random_text}} that had the first { been {{, would have inserted random filter-avoiding text. I think the same goes for a complete lack of URL. For instance, it seems some spammers don't seem to understand that if somebody gets their mail, that person can't just hit "reply" and put in an order! They're using a fancy program that creates a random email address, and they have no concept as to what their program is really doing. -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml