[spambayes-dev] [Spambayes] removal

[Kenny Pitt]

On 9/28/07, skip at pobox.com <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>     Kenny> Hmm, this is a bit odd....  It's almost as if GMail is inferring
>     Kenny> a hyperlink there, but I can't figure out why or where it came up
>     Kenny> with the link because the spambayesInfo name doesn't even appear
>     Kenny> in any of the mail header fields.
>
> I use gmail as well, though I get the mail delivered via POP and only rarely
> use the gmail web interface.  I just went back and looked at this and a
> couple other threads via the gmail web interface.  Not only did I not see or
> click URLs with missing "/" characters, I did not encounter any
> Info/Unsubscribe links which ended in "/Unsubscribe".  They all took me
> (correctly, I believe) to the ".../listinfo/spambayes" page.  Maybe it's a
> browser problem or an interaction between gmail and your web browser.  I'm
> viewing through Thunderbird 2.0.0.something on Solaris 10 at the moment.  I
> can check using Safari and T-Bird from my Mac when I get home.

Yeah, it's definately something weird that the GMail web interface is
doing with the sigs, and it seems to be browser-specific. I opened the
same message thread in both Safari and Firefox 2 on  my Mac. For the
following line in the signature, I got totally different results:

Info/Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes

Safari: "Info/Unsubscribe" not highlighted as a link.
"http://mail.python.org/mailman" highlighted as a link (note
incomplete highlight) linking to
"http://mail.pythong.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes".

Firefox: "Info/Unsubscribe" highlighted as a link linking to
"http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayesInfo/Unsubscribe".
"http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes" highlighted as a
link to the same complete URL.

IIRC, the behavior I got at work on IE in Windows was the same as what
I'm seeing in Firefox on the Mac.

In looking closer at the Firefox result, I think I see what is
happening. The line above the "Info/Unsubscribe" line in the signature
is "http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes" on a line by
itself. The "Info/Unsubscribe" appears to have been detected as a
broken-line continuation of the URL on the line above and was
converted into a single link to the "re-assembled" URL. The
"spambayesInfo" comes from the "Info" part being appended. The
"/Unsubscribe" then makes it *look* like a direct link to an
unsubscribe page, but isn't the actual URL format used by mailman.

I can't be sure, but I think it may actually be GMail that is doing
the combining. First, I saw it in both Firefox and IE, though not in
Safari, so it is not entirely browser-specific. Second, I'm quite sure
I actually saw the link in the page source on IE. On the Mac, all I
could get from source was the GMail JavaScript, but my IE has a
developer extension to show the actual HTML inserted by the JavaScript
and that's where it showed up.

So apparently it's just a strange GMail web interface glitch. There's
obviously nothing wrong with the sig coming from mailman, so nothing
to fix. Sorry for the wild goose chase! <0.5 wink>

-- 
Kenny Pitt