[SpamCop-List] Re: Innocent URLs (unclickable links)

[Doc O'Leary]

In article <caj50h$bas$1 at news.spamcop.net>,
 <nobody at devnull.spamcop.net> wrote:

> At my elementary knowledge level, how do you quickly tell if a link to a
> website is innocent or guilty, without getting my email client to
> actually decode and read the spam as the spammer intended it to be read?
> Some posters here strongly advise against *ever* reading the spam from
> the philosophical viewpoint.  It's a bit confusing, if not possibly
> contradictory?

When you are prompted to confirm reports, you should always give a 
visual once-over to the links listed.  There is a definite pattern you 
should notice for the bogus links.  There are usually quite a number of 
completely different, unrelated sites listed.  Most of the time I see 
it, all the listed links are innocent, and the actually spammer link 
(usually in a form like foo123bar.biz) comes after the parsing is 
stopped, so it isn't even listed.