I don't know if this is the right forum or even the right website for my question, but here goes;

I belong to a message board, and someone anonymously made a post with a link within the message. The link consisted of nothing but symbols such as, &^#$%, etc.

I clicked on the link, and to my suprise, it opened my personal e-mail address.
In the 'To' space were more symbols like were in the link.

How can I find out what the symbols in the 'To' space mean? It must be the person who expected me to e-mail them, but I didn't.

Can these symbols be decoded? This is really bothering me. If I'm in the wrong place, please excuse me. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh! My name is Shorty, and I'm new here! Hi!

It sounds like a mailto: link that is setup to automatically create a subject line. I can't say whether it's encoded or if it's just junk info.

Thank you. These symbols were not in the subject line. They were in the line that my e-mail would have gone to, had I answered it. It was like the e-mail address I would have answerd to. This is a well known, reputable message board, and it's kind of scary to click on a link and have your own email opened with an address to be sent to...in symbols.

Does anyone know if such as this can be decoded, or where I can go to find out?

Thanks again.

Sorry, I misread your statement. You might try something like finger or whois or a similar network protocol to see if the email address "code" validates to an actual person. Beyond that I don't know how to decrypt an email address.

I would say this 'reputable message board' got spammed by an 'anonymous' spammer. Nothing to worry about, unless you want male enhancement pills or stock information. Wait for the moderator to delete the message and don't click on anything that looks questionable from now on.

And trying to find out who's email address it is will undoubtedly prove futile. Best to just forget it and not waste your time, IMO.

To see how the link was placed into the message, view the page source of the message.

Thanks very much, Walt. I feel better knowing that it could just be a spammer.

This is probably a dumb question, but how do I go about viewing the page source of the message? The person who inserted the link into their message was an anonymous poster.

Thanks again, you two!

Firefox/Netscape/Mozilla-- View : Page Source
IE/Opera-- View : Source
Then search for something unique near the spot you want to look at.

Another possibility is that it is the work of a harmless prankster, encoding an address to show how smart ( ) they are.

See if this table helps you decode it.

Wow, thanks, cs2. I'm off to study it now. Hope it'll help me solve this delimma, since it's happened yet again. Thanks!

Also these...
http://thewholeinternet.com/codepage.shtml
http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html

GL!

-Bob