Incoming emails with less-than and greater-than signs get redacted.

leepisaac

We're using v1.14.2 on PHP version 7.3.17 (open source version).
If a customer emails us with the following email:

then we see the following in the ticket:

The text in the above images is clearly not an HTML snippet, and should not be parsed as such.

We have discussions with customers that involve them typing limited amounts of mathematics, so it is a problem for us that parts of the emails between less-than and greater-than signs get thrown away. It's customer content that is being redacted, so it can't be solved by telling our staff to be more careful.

I don't think telling all customers to avoid special characters when they email us is a reasonable solution. I think this behaviour is a bug.

Thank you for your attention. 🙂

ntozier

This has been discussed a lot on the forums.

Please see the following:
https://forum.osticket.com/d/97119-faq-html-xml-markup-and-other

https://forum.osticket.com/d/89909-htmlawed-and-cleaning-of-html-code-corrupts-canned-responses-and-replies-to-emails/3

https://forum.osticket.com/d/90604-prevent-redactor-from-stripping-tags/3

leepisaac

Thank you ntozier and @KevinTheJedi for your helpful responses! I will ask a developer in my team if they can look at modifying the codebase on our server.

For the future, I might humbly suggest that there is a reason this issue has been discussed a lot on the forums - it is a pain point for many users - and those users would be very happy if a future update treats these special characters more flexibly. 😉

KevinTheJedi

@leepisaac

You will need to modify the codebase to accomplish what you want. You can start by looking at include/class.format.php and include/htmLawed.php.

You see, we attempt to sanitize and balance the HTML: < and > are seen as the beginning/end of HTML elements. So when we balance the HTML < random text here > is seen as incomplete HTML (as it has no ending tag) so it gets stripped. We hope to allow such characters in future updates.

Cheers.

KevinTheJedi

@leepisaac

https://forum.osticket.com/d/97624/4

We hope to allow such characters in future updates.

Cheers.

leepisaac

@KevinTheJedi Glad to hear it - thanks!