Yahoo mungs your email

Yahoo’s free Web-based email service doesn’t play well with attachments. In fact, it doesn’t play well with email at all, thanks to the company’s crude method for preventing the spread of viruses.

Yahoo's free Web-based email service doesn't play well with attachments. In fact, it doesn't play well with email at all, thanks to the company's crude method for preventing the spread of viruses.

Yahoo's virus prevention system is, essentially, a very basic 'search and replace' function. Instead of using a real virus scanning system, Yahoo's email service searches for certain strings such as 'eval' and 'javascript', and replaces them with equivalent words straight out of MS Thesaurus – ostensibly to disable any malicious JavaScript functionality contained within emails its users receive. However, the system runs it search and replace routines over the textual body of emails instead of simply removing or modifying the JavaScript script tags, which is the preferred method used by other Web-based email providers.

According to various reports, some of the affected words include 'Mocha' – which Yahoo replaces with 'espresso'; 'evaluate' – which is recognised for containing the string 'eval', and is changed to 'review'; and 'expression' – which is replaced by the word 'statement'.