Non-native English?

Fri Jun 28 18:27:33 UTC 2002

RonButters at AOL.COM said:
>Somebody from the address <MikeGHRC at aol.com> keeps sending me a message
>(shown below in its entirety), with an attached file. I'm afraid to open it
>for fear of viruses, and I don't even know what an "IE 6.0 patch" is, but the
>reason I'm writing is to ask if anyone else sees this as something that a
>native speaker of English would not say. I'm not referring to the use of "a"
>before a vowel (that is native to my Midwestern speech, pronounced with a
>glottal stop where the "n" would go in standard speech), but rather to the
>use of "would" instead of "will"--what do ADS-L-ers think?
>
>The message:
>
>
><HEAD></HEAD>
>
>Hi,This is a IE 6.0 patch
>I hope you would like it.

This is a virus, no question. The patch in question would install the
virus on your system so that it would get sent to still more people,
perhaps purporting to be from you.

My impression from what little computer security reading I do is that
a lot of these viruses are produced by teenagers in Asia and Eastern
Europe, which would account for the off feel of the sentence.

Alice