[Esd-l] Why are urls in html decoded?

[John D. Hardin]

On 24 Mar 2003, Anders Nielsen wrote:

> I am using revision 1.138 of the sanitizer. I have noticed that it
> URL decodes the links in the html-part of a message. Is this this
> correct? I don't understand why it does that - isn't URLs in html
> supposed to have these encodings?

The encodings are quite often used by spammers to confuse
string-matching antispam filters. The sanitized decodes printable
characters (alphanumerics and certain punctuation marks) so that
something like "%46%52%45%45", that has no legitimate reason to be
encoded, becomes "FREE" and thus might contribute to the
classification of a message as spam.

This is about the only nod to spam filtering that the sanitizer makes.

> I other words: Why is &q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jobindex.dk turned into
> &q=http://www.jobindex.dk

Did that break the link?

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 John Hardin KA7OHZ    ICQ#15735746    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
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