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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.
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? And this is different exactly how?
This is immature and childish. I hope he comes to his senses and refrains from this kind of petty vendettas.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
RMS is an advocate of asking people to send the document in a non MS format that can be read using open software.
I wonder what he thinks of this?
On German Usenet (the de,* hierarchy), this is already common practice. In particular, these pseudo-attachments are used to fool OE users to believe that articles carry some kind of mail worm, without really using attachments (so that the posters keep to the letter of netiquette).
However, it doesn't seem to help much, quite a few people are still using Outlook Express. Other newsreaders such as Gnus display some of these pseudo-attachments as real ones, too. (And I don't think this is a bug, it's just built-in uudecode support.)
And Outlook Express has much more critical bugs, for example in quoted-printable handling together with quoting.
The author claims that viewing the raw source of a message no longer works in OE. I have the latest version (OE 6) and all I have to do is right-click Properties for the message, and click on 'Message Source...' under the Details tab.
Oh, and BTW, I was unable to reproduce the 'begin' bug.
Hands in my pocket
You are confusing two different issues. One is the auto-killfile that I perform on myself, not allowing anyone using outlook to read my mails. The second is the "dress code" for posting to a mailing list I run. They're two different efforts.
The first says "I don't care if windows users can't read my mail"
The second says "I don't want windows users posting to my mailing list"
There is a distinction.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
I must say that it is very irritating how non-compliant Outlook and Outlook Express have been (they may be better now). I gpg-sign my email messages, and the email is sent in multipart/MIME, with the signature having its own part. So far, everyone I know who uses Outlook/OE say that the message is blank with "some unreadable attachments". I find this horribly annoying.
I'm done bitching for the day, now. I promise.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Oh, we duplicated it plenty here today, we got a wave of the latest Outlook virus in, it's called MyParty, and it exploits the Begin bug to create an attachment that isn't really an attachment.
Basically it has a message, then
Begin 666 www.myparty.yahoo.com
then encoded data.
.com is executable in Windows, so it happily decodes the "attachment" and makes it runnable.
It can bypass some mail gateway scanners, because it isn't a valid attachment, only to Outlook.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
BTW, read this:
c e. html
.. )
http://free.bluemountain.com/home/ImportantNoti
There is evidence that MS has actually done something along the lines of what this gentleman did on purpose as a means of retribution to a company that opposed being bought out (or some other interest of MS's
"Old man yells at systemd"
Say we all started doing this, would it have any effect? Probably not.
Your average Outlook user is the same person who just accepts that they have to reboot their computer 3 times/day and has never quite figured out that that "Windows Update" link on their start menu does. Basically, I see 2 scenarios:
1. User tries to open email, it doesn't work. User thinks "oh well, maybe outlook's not feeling well, I'll try again later" and keeps going... probably forgetting about the email altogether
2. User tries email, it doesn't work. User tries again later, still doesn't work. User contacts sender and gets pissed off when sender says "yeah, I rigged it so you couldn't open my message with that crappy mail program. I'm so 1337."
I mean sure it's fun to screw with exclusive MS users every once in a while but this just makes the sender look like a little brat...
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
Actually, you can use Netscape mail with "Outlook" (really Exchange) servers - I do it every day. Just have your admin turn on the IMAP connectivity option (whatever it's called, IMAP something anyway) on your Exchange server. There's no reason at all to jump into the security hole that is Outlook.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
This is really no different from the countless web sites with such poorly-written code that users are forced to use IE for the page to display at all. Stop giving yourselves ulcers over something so insignificant in the daily course of life.
-Legion
It should be begin with two spaces after it.
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
I'm replying to my own post, sorry.
I'm using the latest Outlook Express and Ctl-F3 works fine to see the original source of any email. Not sure where this guy is getting his info. Maybe it's different on XP (I'm on Windows 2000), but I'm using the newest OE (6.000.2600) so it shouldn't be different.
Ctl-F3 is handy for copying and pasting SPAM messages into SpamCop web forms.
-Russ
Me
I read the english e-mail and he explains his position (I don't quite understand the hack though)
The hack is to begin the message body with
begin
Outlook interprets this as starting a uuencoded section, and turns perfectly readable text into gobbly-dy gook.
The other hack is to change the Reply-To: header as Outlook usually does when it marks the messages read. Then he adds a novel X header that seems to imply his email was actually censored somewhere along the way. So, the Outlook user sees gobblydy gook instead of a message bbdy if he sees the message at all, and if he tries to diagnose the problem will be immediately be misled by the novel X header into thinking he was censored. Whereupon he goes to his sysadmin, who will read the email in plain text, and laugh heartily. Or cry.
I understand the purpose of the ">" is to escape the "From " that separates emails. But I never understood why it was not unescaped upon reading the email.
By the way the problem is so common that the LaTeX manual has an index entry called, "From, line beginning with", and calls the problem "a bit of fossilized stupidity".
Interestingly, this only works if you have the preview pane switched on.
begin important message
If the guy were doing some fizzlebuzz that nobody would ever stumble upon, you would have a point.
But he's highlighting the fact that the Outlook programmers were so eager to be "helpful" that they didn't write decent filters to pick up the start of a UUENCODED block. Where I have used the pattern
"^begin ([:digit:]+) ([^ ]+)$"
(or a looser pattern that allows spaces in the filename), they check for "^begin " alone. Or maybe "^begin", which would also trigger on words like "beginning." My filter still catches the start of all valid UUENCODED block but doesn't wrongly trigger whenever the message just happens to start with the magic sequence "begin". (I also usually check for an "^end$" line and properly formatted interior lines, but I digress....)
This is just one symptom of a HUGE problem with MS products. A lot of people have reported problems where a message has something like <html> deep within the body of a message and Outlook INSISTED that the document was HTML... with the resulting garbage output. I'm sure others have had similar problems, but not been able to attribute it to some magic sequence causing the body of the message to be run through an inappropriate filter.
So I wouldn't use this casually to annoy people, but it's a good technique to have in hand when people claim that a problem is due to the sender, not the receiver's mail agent.
end important message
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
anyone who's ever used mutt to send email (and evolution i've recently found out) and has sent email to outlook express users has come across this.
outlook express cannot handle RFC compliant MIME messages, and instead displays the text as attachments.
this explains it
Anonymous posts are filtered.
I call "bull shit".
I've found that once I actually learned a little CSS, and got my style sheets & html up to spec, documents I generated would look the exact same and all of the latest browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, IE, etc).
It's one thing to break the "global web experience" by writing bad mark-up that breaks all but one browser, it's another thing to throw in comments* that a poorly-written piece of software can't handle.
*It is my understanding that email headers preceded by an "X-" are to be ignored by clients that don't know how to interpret them.
I know this is redundant, but EVERYONE'S getting it wrong.
/. readers who actually read the link is far lower than usual on this post. Was it unavailable or slow for a while?
"he is blocking Windows users who are unwilling to accomodate his oddness (by munging their headers)"
No: "No, the attachment bug is far more subtle than that. It
doesn't happen based on headers, which are rightfully the section of
an e-mail that mail readers are SUPPOSED to process. Instead, the bug
is that any message that has the word "begin" at the beginning of a
line will be treated as a garbled attachment from that point on."
I'm finding that the number of
A line beginning with "begin", two spaces, and one or more non-space characters anywhere in the message body will trigger this bug, based on the CrackMonkey thread. I suspect that this wouldn't work in the headers, but I don't think starting a line off like that wouldn't be RFC-compliant anyhow.
Oh, and I'm a sysadmin who would read one of these messages in text and laugh loud and long if one of my users complained to me about it.
"Word doesn't launch. It requires money to launch. It requires that you buy the whole banana to get Word. "
Well hmm, sorta. You do have to be running Windows, but there is a free Word document viewer from Microsoft that will display Word Documents. And no, I don't know why they didn't make it part of the operating system- probably something about monopolies or something.
graspee
Yes, it is in contrast to IE4. IE4's implementation of CSS, while far from perfect, is far better than NS4. Perhaps you're thinking of IE3.
e rg rid.shtml
Netscape 4's CSS support was broken from day one, and none of the subsequent point updates have improved things much.
For a quick overview take a look at this handy chart:
http://www.webreview.com/style/css1/charts/mast
Thank you, you've hit it right on the nose.
I'm not breaking these peoples' systems (as the MyParty worm does). I'm simply pre-emptively killfiling myself!
I also killfile outlook users based on the User-Agent and X-Mailer headers. It's entirely my perogative.
As for the mailing list dress code, it's MY GODDAMN LIST. If you want me to set up an open mailing list for everyone, just mail me and I'd be more than happy to set it up and host it on my machine for you! But the crackmonkey list is NOT that sort of list.
If you have something to say to me, you'll just have to make sure you get my attention, which is divided enough as it is now.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Actually, in some German newsgroups people have signatures using the "begin " bug for quite some time now to show those OE posters that posting HTML to the usenet is not the only strange behaviour of their newsreader. It's funny to see this on /. so much later...
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?