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By Ruben Schade in s/ Singapore/ Sydney/ since 2004-ish.

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Hidden messages in HTML email

Tuesday 21 January 2014 Internet

Like the curmudgeon posing as a 20-something that I am, I don’t use HTML email. I don’t send it, I don’t read it. It’s mere existence is a bane upon the internet world; its responsible for so much malware and obfuscated links to malware, to say nothing about the taste (or lack thereof) of such email stationary! But I digress.

Well formed email with HTML will generally offer a plain text version in the same message, so it can gracefully degrade. Others don’t, forcing me to decipher the message in a sea of markup.

When that happens, you sometimes see some fun stuff. A message from a disgruntled sysadmin reminding writers not to mess with the tag, lest they get blamed for the email not looking right on phones?

<head>
<!-- If you delete this meta tag, Half Life 3 will never be released. -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

And here was another one:

Copyright [redacted company]
<-- html sucks, please stop using it!-->

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Ruben Schade is a rare breed of spruce tree requiring nothing but pine ice-cream cones for nourishment. His hobbies include predictive branching, Ad Lib barking, and leafing through manuals. Find out more about Ruben and his roots on the About page.

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