More likely scanning for vulnerabilities or generating of previews. Magic links don’t work anymore. Therefor most services sends a code or something that you have to enter on a generic page.
“Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
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Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#112Microsoft does this because they're security scanning / checking all links in every Outlook email for known phishing and malware attacks. If Bing has not seen the web page before and it's not in the Bing dangerous web page index it first needs to check it to make a determination of if it's a phishing/malware page by scanning/indexing it before returning that outcome back to Outlook to flag the email as dangerous.
I just love it when they "scan" password reset links.
That should send one to a page with a confirmation button...
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup this is true - I was just being lazy. But what surprised me was that Bing actually indexed them. (even though my robots.txt said not to)
> was that Bing actually indexed them. (even though my robots.txt said not to) Never mind indexing them (ie publishing them at Bing.com), if URLs are disallowed in robots.txt then Bing shouldn't even be retrieving them, even if only to scan the content for malware!
This is a common misconception about robots.txt. It tells bots what they should do while directly crawling your site. But if a search engine gets to a URL some other way—for example if it follows a link from somewhere outside your site—it will still index that page.
Robots.txt is not a reliable way to exclude pages from search engine indexes. That is not what it is for. It is for controlling crawler behavior.
The only reliable way to exclude a URL from a search engine index is to serve “noindex” on that URL, either with a metatag or an HTTP header, or both.
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> was that Bing actually indexed them. (even though my robots.txt said not to) Never mind indexing them (ie publishing them at Bing.com), if URLs are disallowed in robots.txt then Bing shouldn't even be retrieving them, even if only to scan the content for malware!
This is a common misconception about robots.txt. It tells bots what they should do while directly crawling your site. But if a search engine gets to a URL some other way—for example if it follows a link from somewhere outside your site—it will still index that page. Robots.txt is not a reliable way to exclude pages from search engine indexes. That is not what it is for. It is for controlling crawler behavior. The onl…
This is very useful information. You’d really hope that private emails would be excluded by default…
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#115I've had to deal with this with e-mail verification links and Auth0. The user clicked the link after getting it in their mailbox but then Auth0 throws up an error page because the e-mail address has already been verified (by Outlook scanning). The problem becomes worse if for some reason the mail ends up in the junk mail folder so the user thinks they've never received the mail but when you check it looks like the e-…
>We ended up adding a custom page to handle e-mail validation so we could handle the situation where the user lands on the page and the address has already been verified. That's a yikes from me! So I can sign up on your service as anyone with an Outlook account, without verification?
I'd assume the custom page has a random URL and requires entering the email address (requiring a match) or clicking a button. I've seen some account confirmation pages like that.
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only purpose of this link was to verify that the email address is valid. Once it’s verified, you can login.
I have seen services where you have to click a link every time you want to log in
They are called magic links... only thing magic about them is their ability to annoy me
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can say for certain that the links being published are coming from the malware scanning, and not being taken from users' browser sessions that are using Microsoft Edge you should elaborate on this.
I would be pretty mortified if browsers were using user browser sessions to scan content and pass it to bingbot…? What about if you’re browsing something local? Or your bank account?
I would be too.
The point I was making is that someone should research this instead of relying on wild speculation as the basis for the conversation.
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#118I've had to deal with this with e-mail verification links and Auth0. The user clicked the link after getting it in their mailbox but then Auth0 throws up an error page because the e-mail address has already been verified (by Outlook scanning). The problem becomes worse if for some reason the mail ends up in the junk mail folder so the user thinks they've never received the mail but when you check it looks like the e-…
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Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#119Sounds like anyone dealing with any sort of vaguely sensitive information through email, and certainly any corporation, should avoid using Outlook for anything.
The article is about email verification links, which is a pretty clear case where this can be dangerous, but tons of other links can get emailed without being intended for a wider audience.
Besides, the fact that Outlook shares anything related to the content of your email with the outside world is just completely unacceptable.
(Should private links be sent over unencrypted email? Probably not. But lots of stuff gets emailed that's not super secret and yet also not meant to be shared outside the company.)
Re: “Magic links” can end up in Bing search results, rendering them useless
#120Sounds like anyone dealing with any sort of vaguely sensitive information through email, and certainly any corporation, should avoid using Outlook for anything. The article is about email verification links, which is a pretty clear case where this can be dangerous, but tons of other links can get emailed without being intended for a wider audience. Besides, the fact that Outlook shares anything related to the content…
Exactly that.