Forwarding email with GMail turns message into a "Wrom" scramble

I write this in English, because the solution presented here might be useful also for non-Finnish speaking people.

Sometimes when using a webmail’s reply or forward feature, the message or at least the sender’s email address turns into unreadable gibberish like

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Wrom: 
> DXRQBGJSNBOHMKHJYFMYXOEAIJJPHSCRTNHGSWZIDREXCAXZOWCONEUQZAA
> FXISHJEXXIMQZUIVOTQNQEMSFDULHPQQWOYIYZUNNYCGPKYLEJGDGVCJVTLBX
> FGGMEPYOQKEDOTWFAOBUZXUWLSZLKBRNVWWCUFPEGAUTFJMVRESKPNKM
> BIPBARHDMN
> ...

This might not be a bug in your webmail application, but a feature of your firewall program. In Symantec Client Firewall 5.1 and (and probably 5.0 too) there is a feature called “Email (From)” privacy. The idea is to scramle any email addresses in the outgoing data stream before sending them over the internet. On some occations this seems to mess up the whole message to be included in the reply or forward email.

The easy fix seems to be to use an SSL encrypted HTTP connection (HTTPS) instead of plain HTTP. This problem was encountered today by a friend of mine when forwarding a message using GMail at an office with Symantec Client Firewall 5.1 installed. Switching the GMail address from http://mail.google.com/ to https://mail.google.com/ fixed the problem.

My best quess for why this works is, that firewalls (either personal or company-wide) cannot see inside the network traffic when the HTTP connection is encrypted using SSL. So there are no email-address-looking strings in the outgoing data stream for the firewall to scramble, which leads into everything going smoothly.

If your webmail provider does not offer an SSL shielded connection, you might want to try to disable the “Email (From)” privacy option from the firewall’s settings.

An entry “From:” turned into “Wrom:” corruption? from FastMail.FM blog written nearly two years ago lead me into trying the solution above. The thought that this kind of problem could be caused by a client software (let alone by one that has nothing to do with your browser), just isn’t the first thing to come in mind.