Tip: Weird Hotmail Formatting Tip

By David Greiner

March 22, 2006

4 Comments

One of our customers recently spotted a strange and very annoying Hotmail bug that modifies the appearance of your email.

If you include the word News in your campaign followed by a colon, so News:, Hotmail will automatically convert this into the following JavaScript link.

javascript:ol(‘News’);

When you think about it, this term can easily appear in tonnes of emails. Can anyone say Latest News:? The worst part is, clicking it will take you to a Hotmail 404 error page.

We assume Hotmail is doing some kind of conversion thinking this is the news: protocol for newsgroups, but this doesn’t seem to actually work anyway.

We’ve been in touch with Hotmail about his issue, so hopefully it’s something they resolve soon, but in the mean time, avoid using News: anywhere in your email content if you’re sending to Hotmail recipients.

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4 Comments

  1. Chris
    March 31, 2006 6:02am

    Thanks for posting that up David.

  2. Fabian
    April 26, 2006 7:13pm

    Any ‘News’ ;) from Hotmail about this bug yet??

  3. Dave Greiner
    April 26, 2006 10:38pm

    Now c’mon, you just asked that so you could throw in the pun… admit it ;) Unfortunately not Fabian, in fact I haven’t heard a thing back since submitting the original bug. I might give it another go now.

  4. joe
    July 8, 2007 1:31pm

    that`s cool i just got an email with that on it

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