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.

WTF makes Mr. Moffitt so important

[Anonymous Coward]

that I wouldn't see this as a GOOD thing if I used Outlook?

Borked?

[Soko]

From the site now:

Warning: Too many connections in /data/html/gnuheter/mainfile.php on line 17
Unable to select database

Shouldn't that be

"Werniga: Esha tue amany conecctionsa in der /data/hacht-ema-el/gnuheter/mainafiler.peea-haich- a-pee on der lingna sevetoon. Der databesa ist "BORK BORK BORK".

Well since he FBI and NSA use it :)

[CDWert]

Since we all know the FBI and NSA can decrypt pretty much at will, and they all use Outlook to read our messages, perhaps this is the best way to secure it . Well just muck the header up, theyll be too busy trying to decrypt someting that isnt encrypted to figure it out .

I am of course being my usual smart ass self.

I think someone should be free to send whatever the hell they want HOWEVER they want to their colluges, a bunch of people griping this is bad, bad for linux, what does RMS say, WHO CARES !!!!

This, if it were acually serious, it isnt. WOULD be a matter between the sender and the recipient.
Youre not going to be in or do business long if noone with outlook can read your mail.

Re:Stupid...

[stefanlasiewski]

I hope he comes to his senses and refrains from this kind of petty vendettas.

You are right, he is immature. With this ./ story, he is now famous (for at least 15 minutes, anyways).I bet you 1 beer that he will use this to boost his petty vendetta.

Yay. Immaturity and fame, what a great combination!

Re:Slashdotted already

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's forbidding links with slashdot as the referrer. After all, we're all WRONG to be using slashdot, and we must be PUNISHED!

Re:The best way to convert people from Microsoft..

[Arcturax]

Would that make Mac OS the Delorian of Operating systems?

With OS X being the back to the future car that can time travel and fly ;)

Lameness filter encountered!

[Omega]

You know, it's funny. I was trying to post one of the needlessly long headers of crap that Outlook generates for each-and-every e-mail so I could make a point, but when I tried to "PreviewPost" I encountered a "Lameness filter."

Right on, slashdot. ;)

Non destructive but helpful

[mikeraz]

Header to embed in all of your email is:

X-Message: This could be an Outlook virus! Are you sure you want to continue using Outlook?

Wish I could take credit for it... A person who receives an email with that in the header will have a red flag displayed next to the item in the list of emails and the message itself will display at the top of the email display when the message is read.

Re:Slashdotted already

[Prowl]

what can linus' mother do with her tongue that makes guys feel "lucky"?

Lighten up!

[refactored]

Lighten up lad. "It's funny, laugh!"

This has nothing to do with advocacy, monopolies, anti-this or that. Its good clean schlap-stick fun.

My personal X-headers include...
X-Apparently-From: mars
X-Complaints-To: /dev/null

Hmm.
grep -E '^X-[^:]+:' < read-messages| sort -u Should give me some more fodder. Hmm, those Importance and Priority headers might do something entertaining.

Re:Stupid...

[ChrisDolan]

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.

The answer, as with everything, is pr0n

[flacco]

Start posting messages with pr0n attachments that cannot be viewed in Outlook Express. OE's market share will collapse.

Microsoft's support page.

[BubbaFett]

Here's what Microsoft has to say about it. [microsoft.com]

To workaround this problem:

• Do not start messages with the word "begin" followed by two spaces.
• Use only one space between the word "begin" and the following data.
• Capitalize the word "begin" so that it is reads "Begin."
• Use a different word such as "start" or "commence."

That's pretty funny.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Rupert]

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.

Give 'em a break!

[Guppy06]

Aren't Outlook and OE users punished enough for their foolishness by the likes of sircam? :)

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

[iabervon]

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".

Re:Hmm seems to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no problem. Since Microsoft says it isnt a bug - it isnt a bug. Period. Not being able to read the messages is purely an illusion.

Microsoft's recommended fix

[coyote-san]

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.

Re:Hmm seems to me...

[sunset]

... When I thought about installing linux on my kids machine the first thing I did was go to every website that they visited to see if Netscape 6.2 would read the pages properly. barbie.com was the only one that didn't require Windows. Problems ranging from shockwave to Active-X, made it too much of a pain, for this newbie to make the plunge....

My sympathies. However that does make you part of the problem, and not part of the solution.

Re:i cant reproduce the OE bug

[Inoshiro]

I love the "workarounds":

"Don't write the email that way." .. yeah, like a client has any choice about the potentially corrupt data (perhaps designed to tickle the bug).

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 /hope/ you've got the appropriate SP fixes for)
"

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 [kuro5hin.org]," specifically number 5.

Re:No Soap, Radio!

[grammar fascist]

So what would *l33t-swedish* look like?

B0rk b0rk b0rk!

The best .sig virus!

[Dahan]

Some Swedish guys were crossposting between a Swedish newsgroup and one of the microsoft.public newsgroups for some reason... I have no idea how the thread started; by the time I saw it, it had degenerated into a bunch of Microsofties flaming this Swedish guy who had something like this in his signature:

beginhappy99.exe
This is a .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature!
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 :)

long seen on Usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been seeing X-Get-A-Real-Newsreader: <blink> headers on Usenet for years, but this goes that extra step....