Email question

Lexieinhouston's Avatar
Hi,
This is in regard to my personal email; I recently obtained a virus in my personal email and so to be on the safe side, I deleted it entirely and created a new one.

I've emailed a few people letting them know of the change, however this morning I was looking at a sent message and discovered that the text was all in some gibberish foreign looking language, similar to arabic. So, I looked at all I sent, some looked fine some looked like the gibberish. Can anyone tell me what's up with this? I have a Mac.

Thanks! :)



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Lexieinhouston's Avatar
Okay, just looked at them again and all look normal. What would cause this and no, I've not been drinking, ha.


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Depending on what you use to send your email, this might apply.

If you are using webmail, i.e. using a browser to access your email, sometimes the browser might not render the html/css information correctly which will make it appear something akin to Arabic or some other language. This has been happening less and less in recent years due to the improvement in web browsers and the server software that serve html/css script.

While I am not an Apple person, I know that the other possibility is your Mac might actually have a virus. I know the general consensus is that all things Apple can't get a virus, but that is not an actual fact. Anything can get infected, it's just with the way Jobs handled the OS for MAC, i.e. closed source code and no real development environment for years, the prevalence of Viruses in Mac's was nearly non-existent, but it can occur. Also, if you use an application like Outlook, it might be infected as a side of effect of the initial virus you contracted in your email, e.g. depending on the app's exe's, it is possible they were infected also depending on the virus.

I suspect it was the first option I mentioned if you use webmail with a browser, in that the browser simply did not render the page correctly. The most likely cause of that problem is something on the server side may have had a glitch that caused it to hiccup when you were viewing.

I am unable to definitively tell you exactly what happened or why, but the two above possibilities are what I think, so I hope those help you.
Lexieinhouston's Avatar
Thank you Phantom, you are always so willing to help everyone. I was using Safari at the time, but I have Chrome, so I may switch to that. I was just looking at a thread here and every post looked fine except one, this is why it seems really bizarre to me. I'm not sure if I copy and past it, if it will appear the same for you to see, but I may give it a try.

Update: I copied and pasted the post that was weird here & it came out normal, so maybe there are issues with my Mac.






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Just an FYI Lexie, a copy and paste won't really be the way to do what you were intending. I don't know what Apple has that is equivalent to this, but in Windoz there is an app called "Snipping Tool" where one can outline the area of interest, and 'cut' it then save it either to the clipboard or a file. If it is saved to the clipboard, then a paste into a webpage/email is possible and easy.

For your situation, saving the image to a png or jpg file would be good enough. Then you could use one of the image hosting sites or attach it as an attachment on Eccie.

Thank you for the kind words. They were nice to read and made my day!
Lexieinhouston's Avatar
I used an app to clean my Mac and it seems better now. Glad I made your day kind Sir!
jframe2's Avatar
Just curious as to how you know the virus came in with an email? As opposed to getting it from a website.