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I just signed up for a new online account with somebody-or-other. The emailed my new account information to my GMAIL account, which was nice. However, they also emailed me my password in plain text. I really didn’t want this plain text password just sitting around, so this is what I did.
This step turned out to be completely useless.
I’m not a fan of all Microsoft products, but a few of them are really top notch. At my corporate jobs, I’ve used MS Outlook and I still think it’s the best email client out there. It always worked well and could be linked to my mobile phones uk, so I could check my email wherever I was. It was the software that first showed me it was possible to edit an email that you had already received. This is personal email, however, so I had to find a solution that worked on my Macbook Pro with OSX 10.4
I figured if Outlook could do it, then it’s little brother Entourage could probably do the same. And I was right! Well, sort of. I opened the message and selected Message > Edit Message. This is where it got hairy. I got the error message,
Are you sure you want to turn off HTML formatting?
I really didn’t, but I figured it would be worth it, so I continued. Immediately I got the next warning,
Any changes made to a Hotmail or IMAP message will only affect the local copy of the message. The original message on the server will not be changed. Also, if you move this message to another folder on the server, you will lose your changes.
This was no good! I planned to archive my email in my GMAIL account, so this edit really wouldn’t solve anything.
In this case it was TextWrangler, which is a really handy piece of software. I simply dragged the email message from Entourage to my desktop. Then I ctrl-clicked and selected TextWrangler to open. Luckily this email was sent with a Content-type: text/html; charset=“iso-8859-1” encoding. Some of these emails are sent with a base64 or some other weird encoding, and I really wasn’t in the mood. I just nipped down to the portion of the email message displaying my password and replaced most of the characters with asterisks. Oddly enough, only one edit was necessary. Since the email format often includes an alternate text version of it’s content, I was expecting to need to edit text and html. In this case, there was only an HTML version. With a save and close, that part of the process was over.
This part was tricky. I was not able to drag and drop the message back where I wanted it. I had to double click the file on my desktop in order to open it in Entourage. From there I clicked Message > Move To > (my GMAIL inbox). This didn’t work either. I imaging that there was a Message-Id somewhere that was saying, “hey! I’m a duplicate! Please ignore me!”. Not to be deterred, I deleted the old message and tried this again. This seemed to resurrect my old message back out of the trash. So, I tried yet again, and this time I made sure that the old message was really gone. Delete. Back to my GMAIL account (via web browser). I selected the Trash folder, which was hidden under a “more” dropdown menu in the left hand navigation. I forget the name of the button I clicked next, but it was something to the effect of Empty Trash. After that my old message was gone, so I opened the edited version still sitting on my desktop, and moved it to my GMAIL inbox. Voilà, my edited version is now sitting in my inbox waiting to be archived.
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An easier way, if you don’t mind having the sender appear as yourself, would be to simply forward the message to yourself, removing the plain-txt password in the process. Delete the original message and voila.
— Anders Nielsen · 2010-08-26 14:38 · #
Thanks Anders. I appreciate your comment.
— Ethan Kent · 2010-08-27 13:10 · #