July 21, 2002
4:03 AM   Subscribe

Here is a news item for you to reviewuate. Yahoo admits that its softwar mangles words in email in an attempt to disable potentially harmful javascript strings. Google returns 181 matches for reviewuate, which should be evaluate. I tested this myself, sending bad Yahoo words back and forth to my yahoo account, and it didn't mangle anything. Has this happened to any of you?
posted by Modem Ovary (8 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason:



 
I'm guilty of mangling: That should be software.
posted by Modem Ovary at 4:09 AM on July 21, 2002


This has probably been discussed to death elsewhere already... From what I remember, this filtering is only done in HTML-enabled mails.

But with all the stunts Yahoo, Hotmail and other "free" email providers are pulling, I'm just glad I decided early on to run all all email on my own domain - at least that way I'm fairly safe from filtering, bait and switch, and dubious privacy policies.
posted by ckemp at 4:13 AM on July 21, 2002


Reviewuate this thread from the 9th for more.
posted by sylloge at 4:15 AM on July 21, 2002


It has to be HTML mail. And 'eval' needs to be at the end of the word, so it shouldn't cause 'reviewuate' to show up

here's a k5 thread posted by someone who tested a bunch of posiblities.
posted by delmoi at 6:47 AM on July 21, 2002


So are the google hits because they passed through the yahoo filter, or do marketing exec's think "reviewuate" is some new buzzword?
posted by bobo123 at 9:52 AM on July 21, 2002


That's what I have been finding overly humorous about this whole thing: the fact that these mangled words are finding their way onto webpages.

Don't people spell check ... or at least proofread their webpages before they put them up? Ran across one yesterday that was selling vacation trips to see Medireview Treasures.

Uh huh.
posted by Orb at 10:19 AM on July 21, 2002


Couldn't they just stick some empty tags inside of every instance of "eval" e.g. "ev{i}{/i}al"? Wouldn't that stop any sort of script evaluation and save them embarassment?
posted by Wood at 10:26 AM on July 21, 2002


Well, this story was more interesting, say, 9 days ago when NTK mentioned it...

Up next: Yahoo! goes medireview on your a** :-)
posted by clevershark at 10:53 AM on July 21, 2002


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