Bored by Hotmail?

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Introduction

This idea came up because I was bored by Hotmail's standard behaviour.

Every month I get the newsletter from CodeProject. These emails are pretty lengthy and contains several links. I read them using hotmail in a browser. When I follow one link I study the article for some time(5 min) and then closes the window. Now I want to read the next link in the newsletter but Hotmail gives me a popup-window as seen above stating that "this link has become inactive".

This is wrong, the link is active. CodeProject has not removed it. You can get around this by hitting the Refresh button of the browser but it is very annoying! You don't get around the fact that hotmail replaces the original links in your messages with a URL to one of their servers taking the original link as parameter. This is suggesting that hotmail is logging what links you visit!!!

This is Freakin' Spyware behaviour to me!!!

The Hack

I searched around for away of extending the capabilities of Internet Explorer and I found this article describing a way to Control the Context Menus. Items can be added to the existing context menus of the WebBrowser Control by placing entries in the registry and linking these to URLs that execute script.

To add items to the standard WebBrowser Control context menus, create or open the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
        Software
            Microsoft
                Internet Explorer
                    MenuExt

Under this key, you create a key whose name contains the text you want displayed in the menu. The default value for this key contains the URL that will be executed. The key name can include the ampersand (&) character, which will cause the character immediately following the & to be underlined

The following registry entry adds an item with the title Open Hotmail Link to the WebBrowser Control context menu and executes the inline script contained in the file c:\hotmail.js.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
        Software
            Microsoft
                Internet Explorer
                    MenuExt
                        Open Hotmail Link = "file:///c:/hotmail.js"
                        Contexts          = dword:0x20

The "Contexts" DWORD value specifies the context menus in which an item will appear. In this case 0x20 is corresponding to CONTEXT_MENU_ANCHOR, the menu item will only be visible when you right clicked a hyperlink.

Now we have a way of invoking a JavaScript file by right clicking the hyperlink in the hotmail message. Let us consider the format of the hyperlink and restructure it using JavaScript.

"javascript:OpenWin('http://64.4.18.250:80/cgi-bin/linkrd?
_lang=EN&lah=f785aa457196eab7084467d483648024&lat=1098364221
&hm___action=http%253a%252f%252fwww%252ecodeproject
%252ecom%252fjscript%252fhotmailworkaround%252easp
%253fmsg%253d953418%2523xx953418xx');"

The first three lines above is added by hotmail and not of interest to us. The fourth line however contains a parameter called hm___action which is set to the value of the link as it was intended by the person or machine that sent the email.

First we obtain the link that was clicked.

//Obtain the hyperlink clicked

var oSource = external.menuArguments.event.srcElement

var str = new String(oSource.href);

Now the link is scanned for the first occurrence of the string "hm___action=".

//find the index of "hm___action=" in string

var i = str.indexOf("hm___action=", 0);

//if "hm___action=" was found then ...

if (i != -1)
{

//Cut away stuff added by hotmail

str = str.substring(i + 12, str.length-3);

...

}

The indexOf method finds the location of "hm___action=" inside str and tells you where the substring starts. If the string doesn't contain the substring, indexOf returns -1. The index i is then advanced by twelve, which is the number of characters in the string "hm___action=". Since the data of interest is located between i and the end of the string, except the last three chracters, str.length-3, a simple call to the substring method is used to extract it.

The value of str in our example is now.

"http%253a%252f%252fwww%252ecodeproject%252ecom%252f
jscript%252fhotmailworkaround%252easp
%253fmsg%253d953418%2523xx953418xx"

The original link has been URL encoded so lets URL decode it.

str = unescape(str);

After this operation the link is now in its original state before Hotmail meddled with it and all we have to do is to open it in a new browser window

open(str);

Now you can invoke the JavaScript on any link, not just hotmail, but it will only work its magic if the parameter hm___action is found.

Install

In the downloads at top you will receive a zip archive containing two files.

• hotmail.js
• hotmail.reg

The hotmail.js should be placed in C: directory. The hotmail.reg should be run to add the correct key and values to the registry. Don't forget to close all browser windows before trying out the hack. I hope it can be off some help. I know the problem bugged the hell out of me.