What is this email trying to do?

On 17 Mar, 19:53, ibupro...@painkiller.example.tld (Moe Trin) wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.security, in article
>
> <ni62b5-npa....@dougshost.douglaidlaw.net>, Doug Laidlaw wrote:
> >Just got the same thing again. *3x w, which could be www. but
> >119 doesn't appear in the ASCII table at all, and the next ones are
> >.l "&" + another nonexistent one. *The complete line runs
> >off the page. *No wonder I couldn't put them in a Web page and get
> >any sense out of them.
>
> Have you tried using 'decimal' rather than octal or hex?
>
> &#00119 -> w
> &#46 * *-> .
> &#108 * -> l
>
> That's an old spammer's trick for obfuscation of addresses and URLs.
> The leading '&#' tells some browsers that this character is shown in
> decimal. *I'm not sure, but I think it's merely using an 8 bit (or
> multi-byte) character set instead of ASCII. I think it's a feature of
> the browsers most idiots use to read their mail. If you look at the
> man pages for the other character sets

It sounds like you're seeing the spam aimed at Outlook and other
clients that automagically transform such debris into URL's. I'm also
seeing a lot of Unicode, foreign language spew lately, so it could be
in a language you're not set up to display. Spammers will try
*anything*, so it's hard to guess which it is without a copy of the
spew.