[FoRK] Hollywood whodunit: What's eating emails in iCloud?

[Stephen Williams]

Crazy.  This is why I run my own email server.
Our new CEO just switched us from corporate Gmail to Office365 / Outlook.com, for no good reason apparently.
Although Microsoft's published information says that imap isn't available 
and their online support says you must use Outlook, Thunderbird works 
reasonably well with it.  Although it is slow at peak times (unlike Gmail). 
And they have a severe bug, apparently has always been there for all forms 
of Outlook, where they don't update the view of folders with deleted 
messages until they are purged.  Therefore, the Outlook.com web email is 
mostly useless because it is always out of date if you also use an Imap 
client. And they still remove email addresses in the header of forwarded 
messages.  How does no one notice?

http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/hollywood-whodunit-whats-eating-emails-in-icloud-207335?source=IFWNLE_nlt_cloud_2012-11-19

November 19, 2012
Hollywood whodunit: What's eating emails in iCloud?
A reader in show biz writes in with a puzzle: His iCloud attachments aren't coming through -- perhaps by Apple's design
By Robert X. Cringely | InfoWorld

.

Here's a mystery worthy of a Hollywood thriller.

I recently got an email from a reader named Steven G., an Academy 
Award-winning developer of screenplay-writing software used by major movie 
honchos. Steven told me his customers had been encountering a bizarre issue 
with Apple's iCloud service.

[ Apple's control freak tendencies go back a long way. Witness: The 7 words 
you can't say on iTunes. | For a humorous take on the tech industry's 
shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Underground 
newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from 
InfoWorld's Tech Watch blog. ]

Steven wrote:

A screenwriter was delivering a PDF attachment of a draft of his script to 
the project's director, by emailing it from his iCloud/MobileMe account to 
Gmail. The problem? The script would never arrive, no matter how many times 
he would send it. But sending other PDF documents worked fine.

I figured, wow -- is this some sort of spectacular failure of our 
screenwriting software (Movie Magic Screenwriter)? Our software had 
generated the PDF, so maybe we had accidentally generated information that 
was somehow matching the profile of a virus, or malware, causing the 
document to be rejected by Apple's mail servers.

After obtaining a copy of the PDF (sent via Gmail to our Microsoft Exchange 
server), we confirmed the exact same behavior when we tried to send it to 
our own iCloud mailbox. The email never arrived, nor did we receive any 
return notification.

He began experimenting to find out what was going on. First, he compressed 
the screenplay PDF into a Zip file and sent that. It also disappeared. 
Next, he compressed it using Apple's encrypted archive format. That 
attachment made it through, but it came with an unusual comment: "[not 
Virus Scanned]" appended to the subject field.

>From this he deduced that something inside the file was causing it to get 
flagged and flushed. He cut the file in half and sent the first 59 pages as 
an attachment. It got deleted. His breakthrough arrived, in dramatic 
Hollywood fashion:

AND THEN I SAW IT -- a line in the script, describing a character viewing 
an advertisement for a pornographic site on his computer screen. Upon 
modifying this line, the entire document was delivered with no problem.

It seemed not only was Apple scanning messages for malware, it was also 
scanning the content of each attachment and exercising some kind of rule 
about it. Apple wasn't merely flagging the message or sending to a spam 
folder, but deleting it outright.

He wasn't done. He created another PDF containing a variation of the 
offending line from the screenplay: "All my children are barely legal teens 
-- why would I want to let them drive by themselves?"

Yes, you guessed it. That attachment got sent to email hell. To be certain, 
Steven created an email with that line in the body of the message and sent 
it from his Exchange server to his personal iCloud account. That too 
disappeared into the ether.
_______________________________________________
FoRK mailing list
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE