In one of the spam mails I received,

"Content-Type: text/html" MIME part has a strange URL
<a href="http://zbu>vohg.curlford.biz">

May I know where should I refer to understand the standard according to
which this URL is supported by IE (I'm using IE 6.0)?

I tried typing "http://zbu>vohg.curlford.biz" directly into address bar
and it worked (Takes to a pharmacy site). The site seems to be down now
though. The same did not work in Firefox.

Thanks,
-Anbu-

Anbu wrote on 4 Apr 2006 01:32:53 -0700:

> In one of the spam mails I received,
>
> "Content-Type: text/html" MIME part has a strange URL
> <a href="http://zbu>vohg.curlford.biz">
>
> May I know where should I refer to understand the standard according to
> which this URL is supported by IE (I'm using IE 6.0)?
>
> I tried typing "http://zbu>vohg.curlford.biz" directly into address bar
> and it worked (Takes to a pharmacy site). The site seems to be down now
> though. The same did not work in Firefox.

It "works" in IE because it tries to fix dodgy URLs - it'll actually attempt
to open the address http://zbu%3Evohg.curlford.biz/ (notice that the > has
been replaced with it's URL encoded version of %3E). FireFox doesn't have
this attempt to fix invalid URLs.

Dan

Thanks, Dan !

I am interested in emulating that in code and to my surprise, the
following worked.

host -t a "zbu>vohg.curlford.biz"
zbu>vohg.curlford.biz has address 202.136.208.7
host -t a "zbu%3Evohg.curlford.biz"
zbu%3Evohg.curlford.biz has address 202.136.208.7
host -t a "zbu%3evohg.curlford.biz"
zbu%3evohg.curlford.biz has address 202.136.208.7

I had been wrongly assuming that the host command would accept only
valid domain characters (alphanumeric, - and .)

Thanks,
-Anbu-

In news:(E-Mail Removed),
Anbu had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

> Thanks, Dan !
>
> I am interested in emulating that in code and to my surprise, the
> following worked.
>
> host -t a "zbu>vohg.curlford.biz"
> zbu>vohg.curlford.biz has address 202.136.208.7
> host -t a "zbu%3Evohg.curlford.biz"
> zbu%3Evohg.curlford.biz has address 202.136.208.7
> host -t a "zbu%3evohg.curlford.biz"
> zbu%3evohg.curlford.biz has address 202.136.208.7
>
> I had been wrongly assuming that the host command would accept only
> valid domain characters (alphanumeric, - and .)
>
> Thanks,
> -Anbu-

Evil tactic used by SPAMers as of late according to the SC newsgroups.
Basically their parsing engine can't dig past the improperly encoded URL (if
it's not a location is in then an indicator so then this would be a URI?)
and reporting them becomes more difficult.

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/
http://kgiii.info/

"At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my
declining years to the composition of a textbook which shall focus the
whole art of detection into one volume." - Sherlock Holmes