A recent server-side change in Windows Live Messenger was designed to prevent anyone from sending a link to a domain ending in “.info”, because so many of those were being used for spam and viruses. Never mind, of course, all the perfectly legitimate .info domains (as few as they may be, admittedly)…MS thought it’d be best to just block them all. Not just the URL, but the entire message containing it.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that there is no check for word boundaries whatsoever in the filter. None.

So good luck linking to anything on www.infoworld.com through Windows Messenger. And forget about sharing any C# code snippets that refer to MessageBoxIcon.Information.

Oh, and even sadder? This isn’t the first time Microsoft’s done this. A while back, they started blocking any messages containing “.scr” – thus shutting off all discussions about java.awt.ScrollPane, among other things.

(Thanks to the Worse Than Failure forums for pointing this bit of absurdity out to me…)