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.

Comments

Not effective

[Florian Weimer]

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.

Re:Does this seem contradictory to you?

[nickm]

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.

Dear Timothy:

[nickm]

Two things:

1. My name is spelled "Moffitt".
   
2. As you will see in my mail, the headers are irrelevant. The real bug is that the BODY OF MY MESSAGE contains a line beginning with "begin ". It's Outlook's inability to display ordinary English text that is at fault here, not some header processing GAR.
   

Re:Silly and Immature

[SirSlud]

BTW, read this:

http://free.bluemountain.com/home/ImportantNotic e. html

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 .. )

Re:Use his power for good, not evil (or less good:

[blakestah]

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.

Unix email can also corrupt plain-text...

[ortholattice]

There is an amusing Unix bug ("feature"?) with plain text email that bites co-authors emailing (as in-line text) LaTeX documents back and forth. A line beginning with the 5 characters "From " will have a ">" put in front of it on many systems. This causes LaTeX to render the word as "?From" (with upside down question mark). Once I caught this in the nick of time just before the final proof was submitted. I now routinely change all "From" to "{}From" since I just know my coauthors are going to send it back in-line. But I'd bet there are quite a few published scientific papers out there with the typo "?From" in them.

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".

Re:i cant reproduce the OE bug

[partingshot]

this explains it

Re:Let me get this straight...

[nickm]

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.