Email WTF



  • Just received this email newsletter informing me of some great releases, articles and offers that I just couldn't refuse. :-)

    EmailWTF


  • Considered Harmful

    @screenshot said:

     

    You have received this email because you are a customer of S&N Genealogy Supplies.

    You fail at anonymity.



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @screenshot said:

     

    You have received this email because you are a customer of S&N Genealogy Supplies.

    You fail at anonymity.

    Two WTFs for one...


  • @H|B said:

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @screenshot said:

     

    You have received this email because you are a customer of S&N Genealogy Supplies.

    You fail at anonymity.

    Two WTFs for one...

     

    And you both missed the jpeg image. 



  • whoops!

    Sorry, I had to. 



  • Images?  You know some of us never see them.  An email would have been easy to copy the body of into this rather than screenprint it.

    So one more WTF, taking up far more badnwidth on this site then necessary while causing others to never even see what you are talking about.

    Next WTF is mine, my proxy won't let half the images through. 



  • @KattMan said:

    taking up far more badnwidth on this site then necessary
     

    Yes, an <img> tag pointing to an external host really does chew through Alex's monthly bandwidth allocation... Poor Alex, nickled and img'd to death. 



  • @MarcB said:

    @KattMan said:

    taking up far more badnwidth on this site then necessary
     

    Yes, an <img> tag pointing to an external host really does chew through Alex's monthly bandwidth allocation... Poor Alex, nickled and img'd to death. 

    The issue is it taking up more bandwidth for us. It's even worse than the lusers who send word attachments that could perfectly well be put in the email body.


  • @superjer said:

    Sorry, I had to. 

    I'm intensely curious now. Exactly how did you extract that out? It looked solid to me.



  • @m0ffx said:

    It's even worse than the lusers who send word attachments that could perfectly well be put in the email body.

    Just like the 2008 company holiday list we got yesterday from HR. Outlook was downloading 5MB from the POP account (We connect to corporate through a tunnel to their servers for intra-company e-mail. We have our own Exchange server for intra-office). I just watched it and wondered what the heck was so large coming down the pipe. I thought someone forwarded a video or something. Heck no. It was a one page Word document with a couple of tables and a few paragraphs. The only thing I can think of is that the HR person inserted the full-resolution company logo at the top and pseudo-resized it, but Word stored the full thing in case it needed to be upsized later.

    Not only do we not care about the logo, but the schedule could've been copied and pasted directly into an e-mail.



  • @AbbydonKrafts said:

    I'm intensely curious now. Exactly how did you extract that out? It looked solid to me.

    My guess is that he guessed (using the clues existing on the page) and it fitted all the bits of letters left above & below the blanked out section.

    If you're going to anonymise something, you need to make sure you catch all the bits (such as the text left on the bottom line, which was a BIG clue) and then overwrite it at least 27 times with random patterns (to the mythical "DoD standard"). (or, just once, making sure you overwrite the WHOLE text, not just a strip down the middle).



  • @superjer said:

    Sorry, I had to. 

     

    Close, but I think the email address domain is actually jonaxtell.me.uk, as jonaxtell.co.uk doesn't exist!

    </pedant>



  • @pscs said:
    @AbbydonKrafts said:
    I'm intensely curious now. Exactly how did you extract that out? It looked solid to me.
    My guess is that he guessed (using the clues existing on the page) and it fitted all the bits of letters left above & below the blanked out section. If you're going to anonymise something, you need to make sure you catch all the bits (such as the text left on the bottom line, which was a BIG clue) and then overwrite it at least 27 times with random patterns (to the mythical "DoD standard"). (or, just once, making sure you overwrite the WHOLE text, not just a strip down the middle).

    The real WTF is that superjer made me open the jpeg in paint shop pro to work out how he did that! Before realising I was being stupid.

    He did guess, the first page of a google on "jonaxtell" currently gives Jon's email in plain text, and it's .me.uk not .co.uk

     Ian.



  • The issue is it taking up more bandwidth for us. It's even worse than the lusers who send word attachments that could perfectly well be put in the email body.

    Tell me about it... a lot of our business here is done in 24x80 char terminal screens through a terminal emulator.

    Instead of a kb or two of copy/pasted text, I'll get 4 or 5 full 1280x1024x32bit screen images of someone's desktop (with the app maximised, or also showing the contents of other documents they were reading at the time, or if I'm REALLY lucky, seeing some trite wallpaper of their ugly kids) pasted into word, and attached to the email, with 20MB emails not unheard of. The only question is normally all images in one word doc, or one word doc for all screenshot!

    Wouldn't be so bad, but people normally are only sending it so you can read the product ID or something, so even the full copy/paste from the terminal window is overkill. 20MB to send 100 characters.

    That's almost as wasteful as XML, but without the computer-readable benefits!



  • Wow. Shows how out of the loop I am. I'd never heard of .me.uk before. :/ 


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