Tue, 27 Jun 2006

How Not To Implement Spam Filtering (and web forms)

A "friend" of mine has recently been sending me forwarded jokes and other assorted crap we all grew out of sending about 5 minutes after we learnt how to send emails. This I can cope with, but recently, for every email she sends, I've been receiving an automated email from a server somewhere telling me that it's blocked an attachment, once for each attachment in the original email. That's crime number one. Looking at it further it appears that its not the sender's mail servers doing it, but once of the recipient's mail servers. When it gets an email with an attachment it's blocked, it emails everyone in the To: header to tell them, irrespective of whether they are local users or not. That's crime number two.

I thought I'd email postmaster@capita.co.uk to tell them of this problem, but unsurprisingly it bounced. That's crime number three. Looking on their website, I couldn't find any technical contacts, which wasn't really surprising. I did how ever find a "general enquiries" form, so I filled that in. Unfortunately, they used the following html for the message box: 

<textarea name="Feedback1:fldEnquiry" rows="6" cols="1"
   id="Feedback1_fldEnquiry" class="enquiryTable"></textarea>

The result is that you get a text box 6 rows high and one column across, which is basically unuseable. Interestingly they appear to add style="width: 350px;" in IE, which makes it work. I'll make that crimes 4 and 5, cos doing different things for different browsers is a crime in itself.

I await a phone call or email from them.

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Intelligently Designed

Some one on a mailing list pointed out this cartoon and thought I'd share it with people:

cartoon
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