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We have a emailing list we send out to set of subscribers which have the option of unsubscribing. The method used for unsubscribing involves a reply from the unsubscriber where mailing program looks in the particular mail box to check for unsubscribe requests. It looks for a specific string with something of the utterance of "please unsubscribe me, blah, blah, blah". Granted, we suspected that not all unsubscribing requests will come in as prescribed, but we noticed a number of them are coming back with any space characters getting replaced with plus sign which comes back as "please+unsubscribe+me,+blah,+blah,+blah".

As an exchange admin, I don't know of anything that could be changing the text as it's coming in as far as exchange is concerned. Has anybody seen this before? Is this an email client issue, an email/spam/virus appliance issue, or other email servers like postfix. About every 1 out of 20 comes in like this.

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The first action would be to ask a sender of this particular mail if he already added the +. – mailq Nov 18 '11 at 22:31
That would be my first action as well, but our compliance department beleives that any further contact after the unsubscribe request would be a violation of the Can Spam Act. :/ – hydroparadise Nov 18 '11 at 22:35
Ever heard of telephones? – mailq Nov 18 '11 at 22:45
How does the user reply? Are they clicking some kind of mailto link perhaps? Perhaps they have a crappy mail client that doesn't know how to properly decode a URL. – Zoredache Nov 18 '11 at 23:02
I've seen this with Barracuda anti spam devices. Not sure if you have one or the person sending out the email. The memory wasn't enough to handle the load and would cause issues. – Nixphoe Nov 19 '11 at 1:11
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I have seen this replacement done with parameters. A quick search for space replacement with plus sign found jQuery as a possibility.

If you have a Web interface it may be the problem.

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jQuery in an email reply? – mailq Nov 18 '11 at 22:47
@mailq: Care to look at my email server logs? More likely jQuery or some other process that uses the same encoding is handling the information. – BillThor Nov 18 '11 at 22:58
I love email logs. – mailq Nov 18 '11 at 23:01
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