Re: In a different but... (OT)
Michael Recchione
>No, I don't think that's it, particularly not in your case. The objective for a virus program is to get out of the host and into other machines. The ones that propagate by email infect a machine and then start sending emails out, sometimes to random addresses, sometimes just to everyone on your contact list. Whether the objective is Denial of Service (in which case just flooding a server is the objective), spamming or spreading a payload (adware, spyware, destructive code, etc.), the attacking program has to get a bunch of emails out of the infected machine in order to succeed.
So most virus protection software is set up to identify and block suspicious outgoing email. A flood of emails with identical subjects or identical bodies qualifies as "suspicious", and most protection software will warn and ask for confirmation before letting more than a few emails with the same content go out. To get around that, attacks started generating random sequences of characters or words and packing the email bodies with them or grabbing text off the infected machine's hard drive and packing it into the generated outgoing emails so they'd look different. (That's what the message you received looks like, BTW).
Of course, the random sequences of characters that don't make words in your native language are easy to spot. Random sequences of words are much harder to spot and often get by both outgoing mail screening and server screening. But even these start to develop a profile that can be spotted by a screening program that "learns" (like Yahoo's spam filter, which works really well, BTW). The messages constructed by grabbing text off the infected machine's hard drive are harder, since they look valid and it's customary to quote some portion of a received email in a valid response. A spam message will typically be constructed by having some random quoted portion and the spam message in the body of the email. Grabbing content off random web pages is a further wrinkle - it increases the randomization factor while still usually passing "valid language" tests.
But the virus protection program isn't checking to make sure your email body corresponds to some web page somewhere (what would be the point of that?). It's just checking to make sure the email your machine is trying to send out (or, in the case of a service provider, that it's being asked to pass along) isn't too much like other emails you've sent out recently.