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Hotmail parses URLs wrongly in plain text e-mail

Publisert mandag 4 september 2006 klokka 13:31 Brukte merkelapper: , , ,

Take care when sending URLs in plain text to users - it might get wrongly parsed. The problem is . This has been reported earlier for Microsoft products as IE and Outlook, "®ion" turning into "®ion" for example, but finally we can experience it in all browsers because Hotmail is doing something similar...

I tried to send the following plain text URL (normalized):

http://someserver.com/somescript.php?para=val&reg_whatever=whatever_val

The parsed result in Hotmail is:

http://someserver.com/somescript.php?para=val®_whatever=whatever_val

This was very annoying since my (registration) script had gone live before I was aware of the problem. Anyway, I thought this should be easy for Microsoft to fix... I reported the problem 23rd of June 2006 and still it hasn't been resolved - two and half month. It took a week to get past the frontline support and to a "subject matter expert" who actually understood the problem - hurray. So far Microsoft weren't doing that bad - I understand that I have to answer extremely relevant questions as

Have you tried to access your account using another computer with different browser settings, a faster Internet connection (DSL connection), and a different Internet Service Provider (ISP)? Did you encounter the same issue or not?

This was specfic questions for my problem - I had already answered the generic ones. I'm also happy to have met Gina, Leo and Ronald. The problem is that since I talked to the "subject matter expert" nothing has happened. Does it really take Microsoft that long to make their parser behave:

  1. It shouldn't even try to parse HTML entities in a plain text e-mail.
  2. And if it really, really must parse anything it finds, please remember that HTML entities ends with a semi-colon - is it that hard?

Test for yourself with the link above and let me know when it's fixed - I have stopped checking. (No, I don't care if there is an option in Hotmail to turn off the parsing of plain text e-mails - it should work correctly with the default settings.)

2 kommentarer

Gravatar for Hans Nordhaug

I keep getting “MSN Hotmail Support Satisfaction Survey” e-mails, but the problem still wasn’t fixed last time I checked. It’s safe to say that I’m not very satisfied…

Hans Nordhaug - 01-03-2007 02:25
Gravatar for Hans Nordhaug

Good news for Hotmail users: The new “Windows Live Hotmail” doesn’t have this bug – finally, 8 months after I reported it …

Hans Nordhaug - 10-05-2007 11:50

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