United Airlines sucks

United sucks really hard.

I made the mistake of flying once with them a year ago and I received today a junk email from them, with a disclaimer:

You have received this email because it includes important information regarding the Mileage Plus program or your Mileage Plus account

BS. The content of the email was an advertisement about "close-in award processing fee", whatever that is. It had nothing to do with me, my Mileage Plus account or my flights. It was an unsolicited commercial email, a.k.a. spam.

The message that UA is sending me is: we know pretty well that you disabled all the "email subscriptions" in your account (I double-checked), but we are sending you spam anyway because we don't value at all your time and your privacy.

Now the interesting technical part; I went to their website to check the preferences and change the email address:

1. the form field for the address only accepts emails up to 40 characters, which wasn't enough for me (I have a very long last name), so I had to manually fix the page DOM with Firebug; if you don't know how to do this, you're out of luck with United;
2. there was a buggy JavaScript in the page that rejected my email as invalid (without saying why!), even a shortened version with less than 40 characters; I suspect they don't like a "+" in it, but my email is perfectly valid (I've checked in the RFCs). I wrote "javascript:document.ProfileForm.submit()" in my browser URL bar to work around this bug and send the info to their server anyway and it worked just fine.

This means that they're doing different checks on the client and on the server for at least two details: email address length and valid characters. This is very stupid and can lead to bugs and security vulnerabilities.

I really hope that their server-side software wasn't written by the same group of people that wrote the HTML and JavaScript, or there may be serious security problems hidden under that crap.

And, BTW, for their site (which isn't valid HTML) they also use an ugly table-based layout with fixed width in pixels, and no graceful degradation with JavaScript disabled. That's bad, not criminally bad, but still very very bad. Their website would have been considered obsolete ten years ago...

Anyway, I've flagged their mail as spam in Gmail and will continue to do so with any future unsolicited email I'll receive from them.

So my suggestion is: don't register an account on the United Airlines website and don't fly with them. They suck.

P.S., message for UA: I'm willing to update or even remove this post if you apologize for the spam, promise to stop sending it and fix the bugs on your website.