CivicPlus ( www.civicplus.com ) is a company that offers hosting, design, and a CMS for local governments. CivicPlus has a weird idea of how you should email links to your friends.

 

 This is the standard "email this link to a friend" page for all CivicPlus sites, notice how you can put in any email address and any message you want? Notice how by doing this you are using either CivicPlus' email server or the local government's email server? It's not the best way to send out spam, but if you're in a hurry, or don't believe in all those automated bots, it's perfect. I supose you could automate your spam sending as well with a little time.

CivicPlus likes the idea so much, they use it on their own page. http://civicplus.com/emailpage.asp 

At least the form is real simple to understand and use... 

...niiice.  They don't even seem to alter the subject or the message body in any way (besides appending a line with a single period on it -- spot the bug), so you can in fact send any message with any subject line to anyone from any apparent sender address.

Oooh, ooh, I know! You can fake any headers you want! And if it deliberately adds a line with a single period at the end, it means it isn't even using any form of framework to mail, it's using direct sockets to the SMTP server, so you could technicallly drop back into an SMTP conversation by adding your own period!

Kyanar:

Oooh, ooh, I know! You can fake any headers you want! And if it deliberately adds a line with a single period at the end, it means it isn't even using any form of framework to mail, it's using direct sockets to the SMTP server, so you could technicallly drop back into an SMTP conversation by adding your own period!

Tried it, it doesn't work.

In that case, I'm lost. I can't imagine any reason why you'd append a line with nothing but a period on it, as that's the SMTP data termination character (\n.\n) I don't get it, myself. If that's not the bug, then what is?