Automated mail: check the plaintext part (or don't send one) (Shallow Thoughts)

Automated mail: check the plaintext part (or don't send one)

Funny thing happened last week.

I'm on the mailing list for a volunteer group. Round about last December, I started getting emails every few weeks congratulating me on RSVPing for the annual picnic meeting on October 17.

This being well past October, when the meeting apparently occurred -- and considering I'd never heard of the meeting before, let alone RSVPed for it -- I couldn't figure out why I kept getting these notices.

After about the third time I got the same notice, I tried replying, telling them there must be something wrong with their mailer. I never got a reply, and a few weeks later I got another copy of the message about the October meeting.

I continued sending replies, getting nothing in return -- until last week, when I got a nice apologetic note from someone in the organization, and an explanation of what had happened. And the explanation made me laugh.

Seems their automated email system sends messages as multipart, both HTML and plaintext. Many user mailers do that; if you haven't explicitly set it to do otherwise, you yourself are probably sending out two copies of every mail you send, one in HTML and one in plain text.

But in this automated system, the plaintext part was broken. When it sent out new messages in HTML format, apparently for the plaintext part it was always attaching the same old message, this message from October. Apparently no one in the organization had ever bothered to check the configuration, or looked at the plaintext part, to realize it was broken. They probably didn't even know it was sending out multiple formats.

I have my mailer configured to show me plaintext in preference to HTML. Even if I didn't use a text mailer (mutt), I'd still use that setting -- Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Claws and many other mailers offer it. It protects you from lots of scams and phishing attacks, "web bugs" to track you,, and people who think it's the height of style to send mail in blinking yellow comic sans on a red plaid background.

And reading the plaintext messages from this organization, I'd never noticed that the message had an HTML part, or thought to look at it to see if it was different.

It's not the first time I've seen automated mailers send multipart mail with the text part broken. An astronomy club I used to belong to set up a new website last year, and now all their meeting notices, which used to come in plaintext over a Yahoo groups mailing list, have a text part that looks like this actual example from a few days ago:

Subject: Members' Night at the Monthly Meeting
<p>&#60;&#115;&#116;&#121;&#108;&#101;&#32;&#116;&#121;&#112;&#101;&#61;&#34;&#1
16;&#101;&#120;&#116;&#47;&#99;&#115;&#115;&#34;&#62;@font-face {
  font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝";
}@font-face {
  font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝";
}@font-face {
  font-family: "Cambria";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size:
12pt; font-family: Cambria; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue;
text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color:
purple; text-decoration: underline; }.MsoChpDefault { font-family: Cambria;
}div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1;
}&#60;&#47;&#115;&#116;&#121;&#108;&#101;&#62;
<p class="MsoNormal">Friday April 8<sup>th</sup> is members’ night at the
monthly meeting of the PAS.<span style="">&#160; </span>We are asking for
anyone, who has astronomical photographs that they would like to share, to
present them at the meeting.<span style="">&#160; </span>Each presenter will
have about 15 minutes to present and discuss his pictures.<span style=""> We
already have some presenters. &#160; </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">&#160;</p>

... on and on for pages full of HTML tags and no line breaks. I contacted the webmaster, but he was just using packaged software and didn't seem to grok that the software was broken and was sending HTML for the plaintext part as well as for the HTML part. His response was fairly typical: "It looks fine to me". I eventually gave up even trying to read their meeting announcements, and now I just delete them.

The silly thing about this is that I can read HTML mail just fine, if they'd just send HTML mail. What causes the problem is these automated systems that insist on sending both HTML and plaintext, but then the plaintext part is wrong. You'll see it on a lot of spam, too, where the plaintext portion says something like "Get a better mailer" (why? so I can see your phishing attack in all its glory?)

Folks, if you're setting up an automated email system, just pick one format and send it. Don't configure it to send multiple formats unless you're willing to test that all the formats actually work.

And developers, if you're writing an automated email system: don't use MIME multipart/alternative by default unless you're actually sending the same message in different formats. And if you must use multipart ... test it. Because your users, the administrators deploying your system for their organizations, won't know how to.

Tags: tech, email
[ 14:19 Mar 27, 2011    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]