#1924 new
Robert Booth

Skulls are being displayed in my email address instead of the @ symbol

Reported by Robert Booth | January 13th, 2018 @ 03:31 PM

Skulls are being displayed in my email address instead of the @ symbol

Please see the attached picture

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny January 13th, 2018 @ 04:36 PM

    Try hitting ⌥⌘U and locate the full From header. The skull is shown when the name part of a sender contains an email address which is not the same as the email address of the same header. This might be an attempt to spoof the sending address and therefore MailMate replaces the @ with a skull (to show the user that there's something unusual/suspicious about the sender name/address).

    Do you know why this happens for these emails? Maybe there's a workaround which does not involve disabling the “warning”.

  • Simon Goumaz

    Simon Goumaz February 17th, 2018 @ 04:41 AM

    Right now (1.10 (5443)) it seems @ are being replaced by skulls also in strings such as Name @ Company, which to me is a bug… the pattern matching should only target email addresses shouldn't it?

  • benny

    benny February 19th, 2018 @ 08:45 AM

    Well, it's not a bug (it's intentional), but there might be a better way to handle it. Note that the skulls are an attempt to make sure that the user notices if the name part of a sender is an attempt to “hide” the address part. Some users might not notice if it's subtle, e.g.:

    "good @ example.com" <bad@example.com>
    

    MailMate would just display good @ example.com and the user might think that this is the real sender (despite the spaces). The skull is more easily noticed.

    (It's a horrible idea to use Name @ Company in my opinion, but that's a different issue.)

    There's a hidden preference available to completely disable the skulls:

    defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmNospoofSymbolDisabled -bool YES
    
  • Simon Goumaz

    Simon Goumaz February 22nd, 2018 @ 12:39 PM

    Thanks for the extra details.

    If the intent is to make sure the user notices an attempt to hide the actual email address, do we agree that putting a skull in Name @ Company is a bug as long as Company isn't formatted like a domain name?

    I like the skull idea so I'm unwilling to disable it, it just covers more cases than it should IMO.

  • Mike K
  • Aslak Raanes

    Aslak Raanes April 9th, 2018 @ 11:15 AM

    This doesn't look good when there are multiple mailbox-adresses in the From: field as described under "3.6.2. Originator Fields" in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt (and 2822/822).

  • Joseph P. Hillenburg

    Joseph P. Hillenburg October 15th, 2020 @ 06:07 PM

    I like this idea as long as I can whitelist some contacts.

  • Joseph P. Hillenburg

    Joseph P. Hillenburg May 31st, 2021 @ 04:15 PM

    I noticed that newer builds now use an exclamation point rather than a skull. That's definitely better - but again, I would like to be able to whitelist some senders.

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