Thursday, December 04, 2008

Glitch or gibberish?

Here's an interesting case of how iPhone can jeopardize marriages. A friend forwarded this in a mail. Its a case of how a husband took a "raunchy" picture of himself and mailed it to some female. While his 'Sent Items' claims this, the guy claims it is an iPhone bug! So the wife, who doesn't want to believe him, but still is open to it being iPhone's fault, got onto Apple discussion forums and decided to ask people. This is what followed.

I do wonder what happened to the couple and feel sorry for that female. Personally, I don't think this is a real iPhone bug, however, I did notice something very similar can be done with Thunderbird (my favourite mail client). Similar in the sense of getting a mail in your Sent folder or (Inbox itself) that you never sent! See screencast below: Sorry folks, I couldn't embed the screencast here, If you're interested, you can see here (SWF).

Here's what I did. I have two mail accounts set up on TBird, Gmail and my work email. Now, I select some random mail from one of the accounts (say gmail) and drag-drop it inside my work email's inbox. Now, my gmail (webmail) account shows the same mail as if it was sent to the account. Of course, the 'To' address field hasn't been modified, but it looks identical to case of being in 'Bcc' when the mail was sent.

I don't think this feature can affect businesses (though it is quite easy to modify the 'To' etc fields using some software) however, it can be used as jokes on your friends or if you want to cut out someone from your life....

Coming back to the troubled lady's case, I have shown that these things can be made to happen but I do not know what the chances of all these happening on its own are. But its not impossible; improbable but not impossible.

Update: The husband seems to have gone as far as creating a new account on Apple Discussions to reply to his 'wife' that he (ie some 3rd person) has also experienced similar problems :P

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you try the drag-drop with a test email or with a(n actually) received email?

Anonymous said...

ivlo vettiya nee?

RR

LVS said...

@anuradha
an actually received test mail.
what do you mean test mail anyway?

@RR
I just wanted to confuse that female a bit more (IF at all she comes across this post; it has the tags iphone email and glitch afterall!

Anonymous said...

ada thu

RR

Anonymous said...

Picture this, you get married buy an iphone and check if its a glitch or not. Oh wait, Apple would have fixed it by then.

SAMIR BHOIR said...

really unbelievable but anything can happen as its technology and it contains errors, may be or may not be this may be new bug which need to be solved in next version

LVS said...

@vishal

i'll get married all right, you gift me the iphone ;)

@SAMIR
i agree..but this seems quite unbelievable!

Janani Rajagopalan said...

quite a sad story...

there isn't much point proving such things.....men who are caught red handed in such things will never accept it anyway...

why don't women's phones get such viruses?? why does it always happen with the men?

Anonymous said...

@janani
"why don't women's phones get such viruses?? why does it always happen with the men?"

Quite the question.. Quiet is the answer.. There are somethings that cannot be explained.. The same is the case why only that particular photo got attached?

Kunal

LVS said...

@kunal
thanks for answering that..

perhaps i suggest women try certain things beyond the instruction manual (which they never read anyway)

Anonymous said...

"Here's an interesting case of how iPhone can jeopardize marriages."

Eh? As demonstrated in your argument, possibly any email client can produce this. That statement alone appears to be an argument in the husband's favor lol.

As for emailing photos from the iPhone, this is done via the "Photos" app, not "Mail". It would be unlikely to replicate this using the method suggested, unless he emailed himself a nude photo of himself, or received the photo from someone else via email. Essentially, it would have to wind up in the Mail app through some other means.