Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Today I received an MSDN newsletter.

It was sent to an address I’ve used just once, to download the XP Embedded SDK back in 2006. I don’t remember asking for a newsletter, so my first instinct was to unsubscribe. Sure enough, there was a link in the footer.

But something was wrong. What happened to the + in my email address? I submitted anyway.

Which didn’t work, as expected. Trying again didn’t either.

So I ranted on Twitter and made fun of the error. Was it a JS error, or in the backend? Then I went poking around the URL and… wait, what’s this? Could it be? No! It’s my email address in some leet encoding scheme! And they turned my precious + into %20! Someone got mixed up between url_quote and url_quote_plus!

So I helpfully replaced the %20 with %2B.

Oh ho, that worked! Will it submit?

Hurrah!