How could MS Outlook’s ‘special’ features mess up a cake?
Gotta love this story from Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration:
Wegman’s bakery in New York has a personalised cake service – send them an email with the message and they’ll supply a special cake with your message on top of all that yummy ‘health food’.
That proved to be a problem when a lady used Outlook to send her request and it was ‘read’ by Wegman’s automated cake decorator. This is what she got:
Image source: Digital Inspiration
What happened?
Outlook emails usually made using Microsoft Word as the email editor. This mean the HTML formatted message has more than standard HTML tags – it includes all manner of custom Word coding like:
which normally you don’t see unless you poke around in the message source code. The receiving email software should ignore the extra tags but sadly the bakery’s system could not cope and treated the extra characters as part of the message.
You can’t entirely blame Outlook – the bakery staff just copied the message into their system and didn’t check the result later saying “we are usually in such a hurry that we really don’t have time to check. and if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them“.
When they copied the text from the customers email it included the unseen formatting code made by Outlook/Word.
