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This is Not a Brain Surgery
Oct. 19th, 2007
11:22 am - Apple Mail and Broken URLs
I am using Apple mail and love it. Except many people complained to me repeatedly that sometimes when I send long URLs they break into several lines and they could not click on them. Today I finally decided to investigate what's goind on.
Apple Mail sends plain text messages with the following Content-Type headers:
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
delsp=yes;
format=flowed
This is perfectly legal, per RFC-3676. It does break long lines, but in a manner, that other mail client which undertand this format could reconstruct them back. For example if another Apple Mail is used to read the message, it looks perfectly OK:
Unfortunately, other popular clients do not understand this, as of today. Gmail:
Outlook 2003:
In examples above, I also tried to enclose the long URL in angle brackets, as recommended by some sources. This format is defined in RFC 2396, Appledix E: "Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context". As you can see, this did not help either.
It looks like that as of right now there is no sure way to put long URLs in messages send by Apple Mail without a risk of them being broken down, when displayed by popular mail clients. Common workardound is to use services like TinyURL to map them to shorter URLs.
Oct. 3rd, 2007
11:43 am - hashcash, Outlook Postmark
Without much fanfare Microsoft have included in OutLook 2007 a Postmark feature which is using "Math Puzzle" for SPAM control:
"A new Outlook E-mail Postmark feature aims to make it easier for other Outlook 2007 users to receive legitimate messages that might otherwise be classified as spam. When a user sends a “spammy” message, Outlook performs the calculations necessary to solve a simple computational puzzle and adds information about the puzzle and the solution to the SMTP message header. Because that computation takes only a little time for one message or a few messages but would take a very long time for a spammer sending millions of messages, the presence of an Outlook E-mail Postmark in the message header is a strong indication that the message isn’t spam."[1]
This is basically an implementation of old good HashCash idea. I think this is great that they are doing this. This is one of few ways which allows to combat zombie computers sending spam email. I wish this implementation become more mainstream in other mail clients.
However, there are several problems with Microsoft approach. The first is that a Postmark feature is switched off my default [2]. The second is that according to some reports[3], Microsoft owns a patent on this technology, which could stop its adoption by other email software vendors. I also have not found a clear technical specficaiton of Postmark implementation, which could be used, for example, to add postmark checking to SpamAssassin.