Invisible Unicode Characters Can Quietly Break Email Templates and Filters

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A scenario is described in which marketing copy pasted into an email template passed a visual check but caused a rendering problem and a missed filter match. Invisible Unicode characters such as direction controls and zero-width characters occupy positions in text without displaying anything, and they often arrive unnoticed through copy-paste from documents or web pages. These characters can reorder displayed text, as in the file-name disguise example, and can split keywords so content filters fail to match them. The article notes that a 2021 research effort, known as Trojan Source, showed similar tricks could make source code appear different to reviewers than to compilers. Developers can detect such characters with a regular expression in CI pipelines, though the article cautions that some invisible characters are legitimate in certain languages and should not be blindly removed.

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