On Tue, 2012-02-07 at 20:13 -0500, Joseph Brennan wrote:
> Now <style> ... </style> with garbage in it is interesting. That
> would never be in real mail. Or so you'd think!
>
Maybe, maybe not. I think spammers have found that you can put any old
junk between <style></style> tags. I base this on screwing up styles
when I was learning to use them and noticing that anything the browser
can't parse in there is silently ignored.
For fun I kicked this together:
=================================================================================
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta name="generator" content=
"HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 25 March 2009), see www.w3.org">
<title>Big red test</title>
<style type="text/css">
Maybe, maybe not. As a pure guess, I think spammers may have found that
you can put any old junk between [style] and [/style] tags. I base
this on
screwing up styles when I was learning to use them and noticing that
anything the browser can't parse in there is silently ignored.
</style>
<style type="text/css">
p.c1 {color: red; font-size: xx-large; font-weight: bold}
</style>
<style type="text/css">
Maybe, maybe not. As a pure guess, I think spammers may have found that
you can put any old junk between [style] and [/style] tags. I base
this on
screwing up styles when I was learning to use them and noticing that
anything the browser can't parse in there is silently ignored.
p.c1 {color: red; font-size: xx-large; font-weight: bold}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="c1">Big red test</p>
<p>Heading should be red</p>
</body>
</html>
=================================================================================
I used three <style> sections because, when I put the junk text into one
style section in front of the actual style definition, that got ignored.
If you cut and paste this example as a file and feed it to your browser,
you should see the first body line in bold red letters. I've tested this
with FireFox and Lynx, which work as I expected. As you can see, the
file has been passed through HTML by HTML-tidy, which says it is valid
HTML.
Martin
