Case Study 5 - Mozilla Thunderbird page 2

Thunderbird sometimes forgets to decode Base64-encoded messages:

Precisely why e-mail messages have to be encoded in Base64, I have no idea.

The following is even more puzzling. Even under the assumption that some malformed MUA would create a message containing a BCC header (which this spammer has), why would any other MUA take any notice of it? Did one of the Thunderbird developers anticipate this and decide that it would be really helpful to disclose this information?

One could argue that this was intended as a shock tactic to expose whoever was stupid enough to send this information in the first place to ensure that they never do it again.

I have been seeing this for several versions of Thunderbird now, currently 7:

I would update to 8 to cease its nagging, but every Thunderbird update breaks Lightning yet again: even Mozilla don’t seem interested in keeping up with the runaway version numbers and mad dash to release incompatible versions of their software.