On 12 Jun 09:57, Ted Harding wrote:

Greetings, Folks! This morning I received a message from the local Police via the Cambs "ECops" mailing list (which I subscribe to -- it's a sort of community bulletin board for local policing matters).

The message itself was in effect empty -- just the statutory "footers" that appear in every such message. The subject-line (as displayed on my mailer) just said:

=?UTF-8?B?RS1Db3BzIC0gVGl0bGUgLSBBY3Qgbm93IGFuZCBhdm9pZCBhICdjYX

But then I opened up the full headers. Lo and behold, there was a massive Subject: therein! It would seem that the sender had typed the entire message into the subject-line!

However, not only does it claim to be UTF-8, but is also somehow encoded. I can't make it out.

So your puzzle for the weekend is to find out what it says! It's unsuitable (lines too long, and some already broken anyway) to paste into the body of this message, so I'm attacheing it as a plain-text file (but exactly as it came up on my screen) subject.txt

Any takers?

$ python decode-subject.py E-Cops - Title - Act now and avoid a 'cat astrophie'! #Surely not that old trick; that died out years ago# I hear you say. Not so, it#s very much alive and well and in the past few days we have seen a number of homes entered using cat flaps and letter boxes. How? Walking sticks, fishing rods, long arms, in fact anything that can be used to grab hold of those precious items we leave around our homes will be used. What are they stealing? Handbags, phones, house keys, car keys, jewellery have all gone missing. Why break in when you can help yourself? If your keys are on display life is made even easier. Not only will they be able to open your doors they may well take your car from the drive loading it up before they go! What can you do? Think like a burglar. Look through your letter boxes and animal flaps. What you can see they see they can see. What you can grasp they may take and remember, if you can get in without forcing entry so can they. Also, let your neighbours know and report any suspicious activity straight away. Please don#t make it easy for burglars. Take action today and help us all to stay safer. $

I edited your text a bit, so I'll attach the python file and the subject.txt I ended up with...

Cheers,

(Ted Harding) wrote:

Any takers?

this quick-and-dirty Perl:

use MIME::Base64; $/=undef; $_=<>; $_=~s/^Subject: //; $_=~s/\s+//g; $_=~s/(=?UTF-8?B?)/\n/g; foreach $line (split('\n')) { print decode_base64($line), "\n"; }

says:

""" E-Cops - Title - Act now and avoid a 'cat astrophie'! “Surely not that old trick; that died out years ago” I hear you say. Not so, it’s very much alive and well and in the past few days we have seen a number of homes entered using cat flaps and letter boxes. How? Walking sticks, fishing rods , long arms, in fact anything that can be used to grab hold of those precious items we leave around our homes will be used. What are they stealing? Handbags, phones, house keys, car keys, jewellery have all gone missing. Why break in when you can help yourself? If your keys are on display life is made even easier. Not only will they be able to open your doors they may well take your car from the drive loading it up before they go! What can you do? Think like a burglar. Look through your letter boxes and animal flaps. What you can see they see they can see. What you can grasp they may take and remember, if you can get in without forcing entry so can they. Also, let your neighbours know and report any suspicious activity straight away. Please don’t make it easy for burglars. Take action today and help us all to stay safer. """

-- Martijn