Borking Outlook Express 1097
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.
Stupid... (Score:2, Informative)
This is immature and childish. I hope he comes to his senses and refrains from this kind of petty vendettas.
/Janne
RMS says not to do this kind of thing? (Score:2, Informative)
I wonder what he thinks of this?
Re:The best way to convert people from Microsoft.. (Score:1, Informative)
umm... the word is exclude
Bug with UUdecoding? (Score:1, Informative)
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.
You mean the 'begin 644' you see at the start of UUencoded messages? Still beaten with the 'view source' button in a message's properties.
Cute. An old holdover from the days before MIME. I thought they started blocking these after Happy99 caused trouble.
Not effective (Score:4, Informative)
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.
View message source still works (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, and BTW, I was unable to reproduce the 'begin' bug.
Re:Does this seem contradictory to you? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Outlook is obnoxious (Score:2, Informative)
I'm done bitching for the day, now. I promise.
Dear Timothy: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"begin" bug (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Silly and Immature (Score:5, Informative)
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
Neat hack, but... (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:It's people like him (Score:2, Informative)
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.
For fuck's sake (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:i cant reproduce the OE bug (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OE is pretty great (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Use his power for good, not evil (or less good: (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The best way to convert people from Microsoft.. (Score:1, Informative)
First of all, there's nothing "arbitrary": about it, the exclusion is very specific. In addition, those who are excluded are "self-selected" -- it is their choice to be in the excluded group.
I am a Windows user, almost exclusively (I also have a doorstop...er, uh, I mean an out-of-date Mac). I can well imagine reasons why the "crackmonkey" list may wish to have discussions without my participation, or that of any Windows user and that is their right! This has nothing at all to do with racism, discrimination, hate-crime or anything other than the selection criteria of a special-purpose mailing list. You are being hysterical ("insightful") about this.
Unix email can also corrupt plain-text... (Score:5, Informative)
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:OE is pretty great (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Silly and Immature (Score:3, Informative)
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
this isn't "borking" outlook. (Score:3, Informative)
outlook express cannot handle RFC compliant MIME messages, and instead displays the text as attachments.
Re:i cant reproduce the OE bug (Score:5, Informative)
this explains it [microsoft.com]
Re:Using a de facto incoming filter (Score:1, Informative)
Umm, could somebody please mod this down to -1 to minimize the damage? Part of the effectiveness of the bar is that people have to figure out what the hell is going on. Groups that do this pretty specifically request that you not tell others how to do it when you figure it out. SO PLEASE DON'T.
Re:Hmm seems to me... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:3, Informative)
"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
the "original email" and where it came from... (Score:1, Informative)
(and for those who doubt, search google under my Slashdot login, and you'll soon discover the truth)
A quick timeline for the issue:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tron/message/3654
"It occurs to all of a sudden posts by Nick Moffit cause daily digests from
the server to get corrupted and now I'm starting to get the following
attachment:
Now I know Nick's email have been a problem to list readers before, luckily
I wasn't one of them... now I am... or it could be Mr Lawrances stuff... or
a combination.
Notice how the email reply below dies at Nicks message....
----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 8:24 PM
Subject: [Tron] Digest Number 611
There are 16 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. New Tron 2.0 info on IGN
From: "ryanosity"
2. Re: Re: Cropping
From: Jerronimo
3. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: Jerronimo
4. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: esotek@a...
5. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "Peter A. Peterson II"
6. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "John Silveria"
7. Re: Re: Cropping
From: "John Silveria"
8. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: Scott Jerry Lawrence
9. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "John Silveria"
10. Re: the new score and what to expect from
2.0
From: "John Silveria"
11. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: Nick Moffitt
12. Re: Re: Guard cut in half on solar sailer?
From: Nick Moffitt
13. Re: Re: Guard cut in half on solar sailer?
From: Nick Moffitt
14. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "Adam D. Moss"
15. Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
From: "Adam D. Moss"
16. Re: bloopers and practical jokes
From: "Lake Me Poster"
*text cut*
Message: 11
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 10:58:21 -0800
From: Nick Moffitt
Subject: Re: Re: Tron 20th DVD
>
>"
After some discussion of the issue on the list,
which you can read in the archives, I started writing up an article to ferret out info on why people felt the need to do this.
Discussion also started after a bit on CrackMonkey as well.
Then, after a few emails from the EFF and Opensource.org, I bit the bullet and asked Nick the self-same questions that I had to others.
You now know this as the "original email".
Now, the article is waiting for more comments and some fleshing out, and I don't know if it will ever see the light of day, but I do intend on finishing it.
When I first started it, though, it was intended to see 'how far was too far' when supporting something like open source or free software.
Originally, I had accused Nick of being a zealot with this. I have since recanted that, and while I disagree with his methods, having heard his side, something I discovered that many people were listening to, that his point is well put.
While on one hand, he was, as I saw it mentioned earlier, "punishing the users for the crimes of the OS". It can be true to say that it's not their fault that Microsoft isn't repairing these bugs, but it can be also the user's fault for not making sure that their product is fully updated.
On the other hand, one could think that Nick was trying to force people to see his way of thought.
On yet another, he could have been doing it for the laughs.
Like all jokes and lessons, though, the line must be drawn when it stops being funny.
For some, it still is. For a majority of others, it stopped being funny a while back.
As for the mailing list issue.
Nick has said in no small words that the list is restrictive. If was a Yahoo group, or something publicly hosted, then the issue could be raised
that he was censoring content.
But it is a private group, and being as such, he can and has put restrictions on membership.
As a private group, hosted on his own equipment,
he can and does have every right to raise the bar a little. View it as a club with a dress code, as Nick suggests.
The whole issue originally arose on the Tron mailing list, a Yahoo! hosted mailing list.
Because of this, this could have been acted upon
by Yahoo! management as a disruption of service for some people.
So the argument comes down to whether Nick was in the right or wrong. Everyone will have their opinion on this. I only ask that you listen to everyone before making yours.
Don't be so blind to your cause, whatever it may be, just because you agree. There are always two sides to a story, and at least have the courtesy to listen to the other side.
Nick was doing it for the laughs.
He is a supporter of the Free Software movement,
but he was not doing it in support of that.
It did cause problems on a public mailing list,
and a rather lengthy and great flame war on another. This is one of those events that may bring light to a whole new issue.
Discrimination by what Operating System you use.
Ponder that issue, while as a Windows user, I'll go sit in the back of the bus.
Re:Use his power for good, not evil (or less good: (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Been /.'d already (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Hmm seems to me... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
OE "begin " bug is old (Score:2, Informative)