> On 9 Jan 2018, at 15:25, Bill Cole > <postfixlists-070...@billmail.scconsult.com> wrote: > > This sort of mail -- a PDF attached to a brief text message -- describes >90% > of the spam that has made it through my spam filters in the past 6 months, … > > … the most common sorts of FPs are cases of mail not having the form and > content of typical business (or personal) one-to-one email. Like it or not, > "rich" content in email is pervasive these days so doing it in odd ways like > embedded PDFs with short text parts looks suspect.
I accept what you say about receiving a lot of spam of this format, but I speculate that spammers use it because it's so commonly used among normal people. You're right, in that I often get PDFs from my solicitor with only a paragraph or so of preamble, "please see attached", in the body of the email. But I also often print to PDF in my browser when I buy something online (from an unfamiliar supplier) - my mum emails me PDFs of her theatre ticket bookings to print out for her, last week I bought something on eBay and emailed the seller a PDF of the booking confirmation from the courier company I sent for it. PDFs are a convenient format because they'll always display the same on any system. On a Mac they're easy to create from any application that prints, and display more quickly than a Word document - completely natively as part of the message in Mail.app. Stroller.
