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Mail and regular expressions?

ferreira on 2006-10-24T12:15:59

I was browsing an edition of the national Java Magazine and saw an article about JavaMail. The subtitle caught my attention: "Customized messages and Regular Expressions". I thought: it could not be -- no one uses regular expressions to replace text in a message template. Yes, they use.

REs in email templates

DAxelrod on 2006-10-24T16:29:11

Keep in mind, I've gotten plenty of spam from %FIRSTNAME% %LASTNAME% addressed to %RECIPIENT%, containing phrases like "Dear %RECIPIENT%, have you %VERB% about %PRODUCT%?"

The bar is set quite low for stupidity when it comes to automated emailings.

(And no, I'm not saying everyone who sends out mail based on a template is a spammer, just that spammers have had decades to find new and exciting ways to screw up the technique.)

Re:REs in email templates

ferreira on 2006-10-24T17:23:25

Unfortunately, all of us are familiar with this kind of trash. It amazes me that someone hires such crappy services. (And no, I don't think it would be good that spammers produced nice-looking messages.) It also amazes me that developers do over and over the same tasks and don't improve their tools. It's against basic laziness - but that should be stuff for real programmers. I hate the "brute force" approach and I suffer having to maintain things that started like this (not talking about spamming code; I abstracted away the discussion for every code that do not respect the DRY principle and, gosh, they are everywhere).