Add a pink beating heart to your Gmail subject lines
Sunday, February 21st, 2016Earlier today, I peeked into my Gmail spam folder only to see an email message with what looked to be a gif in the subject line. I have seen a lot on the Internet, but a moving image in a subject line was a first.
Upon closer examination of the email, it appears that the spammer in this case used =?UTF-8?B?876sjQ===?= inline in the subject line to create the beating heart effect. To add to the fun, the body of the message used inline Windows-1252 encoding, I suppose to try to get around spam filters. Below is a partial sample of the email encoding…
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html;=charset=3DWindows-1252">
</meta></head><body><div style=3D"color:#5C5E93; =font-size:21pt">
i=found your photos in
=facebo֤ok . you are=rogue!!
</div></body></html>
There is a part of me that respects the ingenuity, although this totally got stuck in spam filters.
Also, here’s a tweet about the beating heart, according to stack overflow, the UTF encoding refers to a Google specific emoji set.
#ProTip #LifeHack
A =?UTF-8?B?876sjQ==?= in the subject line translates to a pink, beating heart for Gmail users. pic.twitter.com/1mFE9wCI09— Izzy Galvez (@iglvzx) November 2, 2015