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Re: mysterious spam message



    > > mabadebodiduhusibariduzadupiradimovinakedadetisejapuwojo
    > > tecasiseluletiqadividoebeyokubatobijamosileqoxocezixewijiroricoqucehudedimuzem
    > 
    > > iripuhunuminavowegiwucabagopemugagivawiqanin
    > 
    > This could be [...] a character set called "Big 5"
    
No, Big5 codes are usually shifted so that they don't overlap the
ASCII printable characters --- and therefore they contain mostly
ISO-Latin-1 accented letters and special symbols.
    
    > Add to that the fact that the e-mail did not come from Japan and
    > I think we can rule out the Big5 issue.

Just for the record, Japan does not use Big5, but one or two standards
of their own. (Eventually/hopefully all those national standards will be
replaced by Unicode, but that will take some time.)

    > an ASCII conversion of a MIME attachment.
    
Not that either. Binary MIME attachments are usually encoded with
Base-64, which looks a lot like uuencode (uses all printable ASCII
characters). Text attachments usually employ the "quoted printable"
method, whereby any 8-bit codes are replaced by triplets "=HH" where
"HH" is the appropriate hexadecimal code.

The mystery strings could be an attempt to generate pronounceable random
gibberish.

Else it could be a code where each letter is mapped to a CV pair,
probably 1-to-many.  (I used such a code for fun in high school.
That was the third round in a series of escalating crypto challenges.
It was also the last one, since my partner couldn't crack it.)

BTW, the second and third lines were proabbly a single line 
that got split by some dumb mailer along the way.

All the best,

--stolfi