Charles on… anything that comes along

Looked at my Hotmail inbox. It has a phishing email, which I click on just for the fun of it (while reflecting that it’s not much of a reflection on Hotmail’s spam filters).

Except the filter is saying “This message may be a phishing scam”. Verily, you’re right, Mr or Ms Hotmail Filter. “Learn more”, it offers, with a hotlink.

I click. A window opens up. Does it explain “phishing scam”? That’s what you’d expect. But no. Here’s what it tells you:

About Sender ID, spoofing, and phishing

Sender ID is a technical solution started by Microsoft and other industry leaders to help fight spoofing and phishing, which are the two primary deceptive practices used by senders of junk e-mail. For more information, visit the Sender ID Framework Overview web page.

By now I’m already going “huh? What’s this got to do with my message?”

Notes

Windows Live Hotmail treats all messages that fail Sender ID and phishing tests as fraudulent, and warns the user about opening these messages. For information about how to read blocked e-mail messages, see Block or allow messages from specific senders and domains.

If you experience difficulties when you use another mail service to send your mail but you use your Windows Live Hotmail address as the sending address, contact the network administrator of the other service for help.

This is classic Microsoft prolixity. Explain everything else, and then use that everything to explain the thing you came for in the first place. It’s the sort of thing that you get when some bit of something doesn’t work in Windows: it says stuff like “There seems to be a problem with your network, resulting in error -5544. Contact your system administrator. This may be because the mouse has come disconnected.”

The sensible way to communicate the email problem would be to say

“We think this message is a phishing scam because it fails our Sender ID test. Sender ID checks to see whether the ‘From’ part of a message matches the internet location the message came from. In this case, it seems not to have. The test can be wrong, but you should take care if you choose to view its contents.”

(Actually, you could drop the last two sentences and just use “Only follow this if you’re certain you should.”)

However it appears that everybody at Microsoft is forced to swallow a dictionary on entering the premises, and no dialog box shorter than 100 words is allowed to survive unexpanded. Stupid.

(And I did look for a sensible page that would explain in payperson’s language what Sender ID is. There’s Microsoft’s page, and there’s the Wikipedia page, and neither is written with normal folk in mind. It makes the Higgs boson explanation look a doddle. Which it is. Particle physics looks simpler than computing? Whodathunk?)

At the other end of the scale is Apple, which (when you can’t connect to a wireless network) says “There was an error joining the network”. Uh-huh, what sort of error? “Try again” it offers, or “OK”. Neither quite gets there. Bad password? Wireless network vanished? What?

And then at right angles to both are Linux-style terminal messages from open source stuff. This is miles long and says things like “application failed with setting -a 33 -b 5 rdd-ee 333 f -44 because terminals bound unapplied.” And you say Whaaaat?

There must be a happy medium somewhere in the middle. Isn’t there?

(Pic from Toddcam. Cool pics - try ‘em.)

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