I’ve had difficulties with emails since 1990, when Mike Peters of Mother Goose and Grimm fame asked me at the Frankfurt Book Fair if I used email. “Of course!” I blustered, but when he asked me for my email address I gave him my street address. “Hmmm”, he said, “it normally looks like 7891234@compuserve.com.”

I emailed him a week later with my spanking new Compuserve address. Shortly afterwards I acquired the heritage.co.uk domain name and I was set fair.

Then it got hard. 24 years later I have dozens of email addresses, six of which are active. We have just moved our fotoLibra emails from an antique Apple Xserve in Manchester to Zoho, a specialist email provider. I do not understand what is going on.

If you have a Hotmail account, you won’t see my emails to you, because I’m blocked as a spammer. This is because we send 40,000 emails every month to buyers and sellers who have voluntarily registered with fotoLibra, some of whom have Hotmail accounts, so Hotmail assumes we must be crooks. I have made my supplications to the faceless gods of Hotmail, and I await their edict.

Yet real, vicious, evil and malicious spam will always get through, because they are cleverer than us. I think I’m pretty bright, but I’m no match for these guys.

Amazon, Google, Apple, Starbucks et al run rings round Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, paying nominal tax on their billions of profits in this poor benighted kingdom, because their accountants are brighter than our accountants. If you’re a really smart accountant, are you going to take your £50,000 from HMRC or your £500,000 from AppAmaZoogle?

On June 13th I got an email from Evelyn Berezin, the great computer pioneer and inventor of the Redactron. It didn’t sound like her:

I hope that you are fine and had a wonderful day, I am sending you this document through Google share application.
Please get back to me with your opinion after reading it.

So I told her I thought it was spam, and deleted it.

Like you delete a boomerang.

So far this morning I have deleted that email eight times. I have marked it as Junk, sent it to Trash, deleted the Trash. Within 20 minutes it’s back again:

Evelyn Berezin / Important document / 13 June 2014 / 17:41 / [paperclip] 1 item.

I am lost in admiration for these crooks. How do they do it? Why can’t I find someone as smart as the perpetrator of this piece of shit, who will sort out my emails for me? I can’t even send a legit email to a Hotmail subscriber, yet this junk email magically undeletes itself every half hour or less and re-presents itself in my inbox.

The one item attachment mentioned is a file named DOCUMENT.pdf.html. I wouldn’t dream of opening it as a PDF but using Textwrangler I had a peek at the contents:

<div dir=”ltr”><span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;”> Click on the PDF to view the Newsletter</span>.<br /><br /><span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;”></span><span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;”><br /> </span><a style=”color: #1155cc; font-size: small; font-family: arial;” href=”http://downloading.grupo-ac.com/Downloading/File/” target=”_blank”><img src=”https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/qDbUszTJrNzANaYfcv9-8jQRfv3qkimsqO8cMuzlN8FLRfK9IkoRC0u4UgeVXCZXsOO1_CpTbclye7_vaRt7nCCKqO42p8HihoKDXLGYZZ4m7vSgAriIf2BID0XOOg=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.terribleman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Adobe-PDF-Logo.jpg” alt=”” width=”96″ height=”96″ name=”144a30c46bb761f4_144a21fd19f1da71_14499b081d4cb33c_144999ac3c9b20ba_1438d9a405be022c_14384ff61191a8bb_irc_mi2″ /></a></div>

I’m no coder, so I don’t know what’s going on here. I spotted www.terribleman.com but that’s a harmless Spanish – English translator called Frank Wynne, who probably has no idea his site is being used by scammers. Does this reveal anything to anyone? I’d love to know.

Here’s the raw source (with email addresses redacted) of the rogue email. Can any reader spot what’s going on here? How on earth does it keep reappearing in my inbox?

Delivered-To: gwyn.headley@fotoLibra,com
Received: by 10.221.28.68 with SMTP id rt4csp466276vcb;
Fri, 13 Jun 2014 09:41:31 -0700 (PDT)
X-Received: by 10.224.98.197 with SMTP id r5mr5505885qan.57.1402677691076;
Fri, 13 Jun 2014 09:41:31 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <evelyn.berezin@anemailaddress,com>
Received: from omr-m02.mx.anemailaddress.com (omr-m02.mx.anemailaddress.com. [64.12.143.76])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id 22si2396478qgj.49.2014.06.13.09.41.30
for <gwyn.headley@fotoLibra,com>
(version=TLSv1 cipher=RC4-SHA bits=128/128);
Fri, 13 Jun 2014 09:41:31 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of evelyn.berezin@anemailaddress,com designates 64.12.143.76 as permitted sender) client-ip=64.12.143.76;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
spf=pass (google.com: domain of evelyn.berezin@anemailaddress,com designates 64.12.143.76 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=evelyn.berezin@anemailaddress,com;
dkim=pass header.i=@mx.anemailaddress.com;
dmarc=pass (p=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=anemailaddress.com
Received: from mtaomg-mad02.mx.anemailaddress.com (mtaomg-mad02.mx.anemailaddress.com [172.26.221.208])
by omr-m02.mx.anemailaddress.com (Outbound Mail Relay) with ESMTP id 9C2AD70000087;
Fri, 13 Jun 2014 12:41:30 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from core-dqe002c.r1000.mail.anemailaddress.com (core-dqe002.r1000.mail.anemailaddress.com [172.29.162.69])
by mtaomg-mad02.mx.anemailaddress.com (OMAG/Core Interface) with ESMTP id 3C6D338000081;
Fri, 13 Jun 2014 12:41:29 -0400 (EDT)
X-MB-Message-Source: WebUI
Subject: Important document
X-MB-Message-Type: User
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: evelyn.berezin@anemailaddress.com
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”——–MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCB_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com”
X-Mailer: anemailaddress  Webmail STANDARD
Received: from 204.152.214.235 by webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com (149.174.155.64) with HTTP (WebMailUI); Fri, 13 Jun 2014 12:41:29 -0400
Message-Id: <8D1553D75A5144F-1E28-27520@webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com>
X-Originating-IP: [204.152.214.235]
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 12:41:29 -0400 (EDT)
x-anemailaddress -global-disposition: G
X-anemailaddress -VSS-INFO: 5600.1067/98490
X-anemailaddress -VSS-CODE: clean
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=mx.anemailaddress.com;
s=20121107; t=1402677690;
bh=422+NfaYYzLc4JvKTrnYhCw9Xvu0Fkec/+9n1xsZP8Q=;
h=From:Subject:Message-Id:Date:MIME-Version:Content-Type;
b=PTTr5KlJVJ8NYFcgHBLeJxPcEwf3a+KF2/Ba2FQX/g6e9j8aRE9n6FvMDC4h/C534
TwIi0/PMZqQ/E0fRG5NfyhWDEZDg7ifkH7FXU6saxNjZ3f3DsSZmM5U+ri5pu8Lv+p
8jO1hYCViiWPTv4EJgoIaUmD8WdQavisRDxa+hxA=
x-anemailaddress -sid: 3039ac1addd0539b29b93466

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
———-MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCB_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=”——–MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCC_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com”

———-MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCC_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”us-ascii”

I hope that you are fine and had a wonderful day, I am sending you this doc=
ument through Google share application.
=20
Please get back to me with your opinion after reading it.

———-MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCC_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; charset=”us-ascii”

<font color=3D’black’ size=3D’2′ face=3D’arial’>
<div><b>I hope that you are fine and had a wonderful day, I am sending you =
this document through Google share application.</b></div>

<div><b>&nbsp;</b></div>

<div><b>Please get back to me with your opinion after reading it.</b></div>
</font>
———-MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCC_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com–

———-MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCB_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com
Content-Type: text/html; name=DOCUMENT.pdf.html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”DOCUMENT.pdf.html”

<div dir=”ltr”><span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;”> Click on the PDF to view the Newsletter</span>.<br /><br /><span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;”></span><span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;”><br /> </span><a style=”color: #1155cc; font-size: small; font-family: arial;” href=”http://downloading.grupo-ac.com/Downloading/File/” target=”_blank”><img src=”https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/qDbUszTJrNzANaYfcv9-8jQRfv3qkimsqO8cMuzlN8FLRfK9IkoRC0u4UgeVXCZXsOO1_CpTbclye7_vaRt7nCCKqO42p8HihoKDXLGYZZ4m7vSgAriIf2BID0XOOg=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.terribleman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Adobe-PDF-Logo.jpg” alt=”” width=”96″ height=”96″ name=”144a30c46bb761f4_144a21fd19f1da71_14499b081d4cb33c_144999ac3c9b20ba_1438d9a405be022c_14384ff61191a8bb_irc_mi2″ /></a></div>
———-MB_8D1553D75B35C95_1E28_7AFCB_webmail-vm075.sysops.anemailaddress.com–

… is poor Ivo Karlovich (Croatia) who was beaten by F Dancovic, who was beaten by M Kukushkin, who was beaten by R Nadal, who was beaten by N Kyrgios, who was beaten by M Raonic, who was beaten by R Federer, who was beaten by N Djokovic.

So Karlovich came Bottom of Wimbledon, every victor above him vanquished.

… is poor Taylor Townsend (USA), who was beaten by K Koukalova, who was beaten by M Keys, who was beaten by Y Shvedova, who was beaten by S Lisicki, who was beaten by S Halep, who was beaten by E Bouchard, who was beaten by P Kvitova.

So Taylor came Bottom of Wimbledon, every victor above her vanquished.