Bug of the moment 2007-03-26

I think it’s best to simply start this one with this screenshot from Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5:

Make sure you proof read the e-mail carefully to make sure you don’t any words out.

Words like <blink> for example. I am a staunch believer in the use of plain text for e-mail (at least until we find something better than HyperText for mark-up). This means that I can type not just spaces, but HTML tags in my mail with impunity.

Tags such as <blink>. It appears that the mail originated from Yahoo! Web-based mail. The message, like all good HTML e-mails, is in two parts: plain text, and HTML. The plain text part just has the tags stripped out entirely. The HTML part has all the tags left in intact.

I presume that HTML mail is now so ubiquitous that the mail software failed to either check or care about the content type of the incoming message and simply presumed HTML, clobbering the text in the process.

Posted 26th March 2007 – Comments and questions?