Getting medireview on our asses

[avram]

According to the latest NTK, Yahoo has been doing automatic text substitution in the email sent to its users, in a ham-fisted attempt to defeat scripting attacks; resulting in a list of seven words you can’t say in email. The substitution doesn’t respect word bounderies, so even if you use a word, like “medieval”, containing a forbidden fragment (the JavaScript command “eval” in this case) Yahoo will transmogrify it into “medireview”. Google apparently now shows over a thousand instances of “medireview” being used as a synonym for “medieval”.

Comments

[drplokta]

It's not quite as bad as you make it sound. As far as I can make out, It's only HTML email in which they do the substitution -- plain text is exempt.

another good reason...

[webbob.livejournal.com]

...not to use HTML for e-mail (à la LiveJournal: do you really need to enter replies to comments into a from you receive via SMTP?). I guess that telling people to turn off Javascript in e-mail and news they view with Mosaic's descendents didn't work.

Are there any good reasons to use HTML for e-mail?

Re: another good reason...

[avram]

Does making your IT department's life miserable count as a good reason?

Re: another good reason...

[webbob.livejournal.com]

Frankly, since I am the IT department, or a big chunk of it, no.

Re: another good reason...

[avram]

Oh. Then no, there are no good reasons for HTML email.

(Chunks of HTML in email might have a purpose, like if you're talking about HTML in the email message, and want to provide examples, but you want those sorts of things to display as uninterpreted source code with the tags visible, not to get parsed and displayed as if in a browser.)