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Borking Outlook Express
Johannes writes: "Swedish Gnuheter has a story on Nick Moffitt arranging with his X-headers in way that makes it impossible to read his email with Microsoft WebTV or Outlook Express. Moffitt states: 'The folks using Outlook Express have locked themselves into a
limited subset of the information that can flow over the Internet, and
are blaming me personally for not limiting my transmissions to that
outlook-centric subset.'
See also original email (in English). Immoral? Or just right?" Looks like Moffit's "Who, me?" attitude is tongue in cheek, but the creative header changes here are hilarious.
From the site now:
/data/html/gnuheter/mainfile.php on line 17
/data/hacht-ema-el/gnuheter/mainafiler.peea-haich- a-pee on der lingna sevetoon. Der databesa ist "BORK BORK BORK".
Warning: Too many connections in
Unable to select database
Shouldn't that be
"Werniga: Esha tue amany conecctionsa in der
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
This has nothing to do with advocacy, monopolies, anti-this or that. Its good clean schlap-stick fun.
My personal X-headers include... /dev/null
X-Apparently-From: mars
X-Complaints-To:
Hmm.
grep -E '^X-[^:]+:' < read-messages| sort -u Should give me some more fodder. Hmm, those Importance and Priority headers might do something entertaining.
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? And this is different exactly how?
In one case, case Microsoft software denied the user the ability to view content.
In the other case Microsoft software denied the user the ability to view content.
Hmm, I guess I see your point.
Start posting messages with pr0n attachments that cannot be viewed in Outlook Express. OE's market share will collapse.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
To workaround this problem:
That's pretty funny.
If your job involves reading the crackmonkey mailing list, your boss is unlikely to be so rigid as to not allow you to use a different mail reader.
--
E_NOSIG
You could, of course, avoid writing emails that would not exclude Outlook users, but you would have to be careful not to
begin any lines of your message wrong, which means that having your mailer arrange the line-breaks for you won't work.
Obviously, working around all of the bugs in software which people might use is a pain, and shouldn't be your
responsibility. After all, it is local mail delivery programs that deal with lines that start with "From". It would suck to
end up having to carefully tune your content to broken implementations. And if you've decided not to support broken mailers
why not trigger the bug intentionally, so people don't read part of your conversation before running into a message
they can't read? I think that people using mailers which don't understand the MIME format shouldn't stop you from using
attachments. If a message conforms to all applicable standards, it's fine by me. Attaching a Word document is perfectly
legitimate, although the document itself doesn't conform to any Internet Standards other than "binary data".
In related news, future versions of all Microsoft products will autocorrect any occurance of the word "begin" with a suitable replacement.
No word on when the riots by visual basic programmers furious that the new version of that language requires start/end blocks instead of begin/end blocks will end.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I love the "workarounds":
.. yeah, like a client has any choice about the potentially corrupt data (perhaps designed to tickle the bug).
/hope/ you've got the appropriate SP fixes for)
"Don't write the email that way."
Consider this theoretical KB for the ping of death ICMP packet written in the same patronizing tone:
"ICMP fragments which have wrong sizes can lead to a blue screen in the TCP/IP section of the operating system.
Workarounds:
* Don't receive an ICMP ping of death attack
* Try to not create malformed packets.
* Munge all ICMP packets so they are malformed UDP packets instead.
* Consider an alternate DoS to use on your own server, such as tear or land (which we
"
Afterall, it's not the client's responsibility to handle data from the universe at large(*).
(*) Ha. Go read "The Ten Commandments for C Programmers," specifically number 5.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
beginhappy99.exe .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature!
This is a
See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information.
end
First people were telling him that he had a virus, then people were telling him that he was being a jerk, etc... was extremely amusing :)
I need to do that next time I post to a MS newsgroup :)