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How would you describe a well-behaved e-mail client with regards to this vulnerability?

The phishing attack I described in my blog post affects all e-mail clients that are able to render HTML and CSS. As for rendering remotely included CSS, this was not necessary, as one might as well include a <style> element.

If you are referring to just GMail as a well-behaved e-mail client, you are most likely correct that it wouldn't be possible to create a legit-looking phishing e-mail (as GMail only allows in-line styles). I think that most other e-mail clients allow the use of <style> or <link> in e-mails. The screenshot of the "phishing e-mail" in the blog post came from Mail.app (version 6.5)

I intentionally did not classify this vulnerability as "Cross-Site Scripting", although XSS vulnerabilities also rely on injecting HTML content, as the main impact here was not the execution of Javascript code in the user's e-mail client, but rather changing the visual output of an e-mail so it can be used for phishing.



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