Email Intercepted.

[Higans]

So I sent an Email to my mom who is a Republican. We had had a recent discussion regarding the state of our country and the war in Iraq. I wanted to give her some information about my feelings and where I do my researching online. the email was returned to my address labeled like this:

Reason: SMTP transmission failure has occurred
Diagnostic code: smtp;571 Message Refused

I know it is a good email adress.

it has a .DAT file attached which I suspect is a virus, but I don't want to open it to find out. I grabbed the text out of my sent box and I'm going to snail mail it to her with a DVD copy of Fahrenheit 911, UnPresidented, and Out Foxed.

I only wounder when the men in the black van will be coming for me.

[Warpy]

1. The mail server was termporarily offline

You should simply have resent it in an hour or so.

[MyNameGoesHere]

2. lemme guess

mail.dat. Please google it

[BlueEyedSon]

3. "Orwelll Rolls in His Grave" is good too!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0008237AA/qid=1141071609/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6120651-0432745?n=507846&s=dvd&v=glance

[babylonsister]

4. Maybe Mom has you on ignore? I kid! nt

[bryant69]

5. Ah it's not so bad.

They just ask you a few questions and then remind you that you better love your country. Then they do some fiddling around with your brain and let you go. Nothing to worry about.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. I don't think it's anything to worry about -

it happens sometimes. A server goes down, gets too many hits all at one time, or for some other reason just kinda "burps". I always resend emails that come back, and it's very rare that they don't then go through.

[MindPilot]

7. It really pretty sad that they have us stirred up in such a state

of fear and distrust that a bounced email message automatically leads one to conclude that spying has occurred.

Now for today's disquieting thought: If someone read that email en route, you sure as hell wouldn't know about it.

[mattclearing]

8. Nice paranoia you have there. n/t

[meegbear]

9. When in doubt, look it up ...

... (I)f you see something like, "571: Message Refused," that usually means that the corporate spam filter outright blocked your message, because it seemed too "spammy."

http://mailchimp.blogs.com/blog/2006/01/sending_test_em.html

Since your message for some reason has a .DAT file attached to it, the receiving mail server probably thinks your junk mail and tossed your ass outright.

Try again and leave the paranoia for the real stuff, like your opened snail mail.

[leveymg]

10. Probably not the men in the Black Van.

Not an expert, and hopefully one of them is around, but this is what I found that seems to identify your .dat file as something a bit more benign than an invitation from the NSA for a long Caribbean vacation in Cuba.

http://www.pchell.com/support/winmaildat.shtml

What is the Winmail.dat file
attached to my incoming emails?

What is this winmail.dat file?

Many times you might receive an email with an attachment called winmail.dat. The file is sent from people using Microsoft Outlook as their email program. The file allows Outlook users to send Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF) information along with the email so that it retains the look and feel of the document with formatting, fonts, and colors when its received by another Microsoft Outlook user.

Unfortunately, the file is only relevant and used by Microsoft Outlook. Users of Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, and other email programs will receive the attachment called winmail.dat with the email.

The file is attached to the email because the original sender is sending emails in Microsoft Outlook Rich Text Format instead of Plain Text format.

[Higans]

11. Actually the file is ATT00019.dat

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that they are not out to get me.

[leveymg]

13. That seems to an e-mail formatting protocol

Found this at a tech site. Again, I'm not an expert.

http://www.ripe.de/ripe/maillists/archives/ipv6-wg/2001/msg00142.html

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.


<<< Message/External-body;name="ATT00019.dat": Unrecognized >>>

<<< Message/External-body;name="draft-roesler-ipngwg-ipngls-00.txt": Unrecognized >>>

[vademocrat]

12. Did mom add you to her junk mail list?

[Higans]

14. I don't think she would, and I was replying to an email that she sent me

a week ago.