Hotmail's urldecode

Hotmail's URL decode is a bit of a legendary topic!

In the early days of Hotmail, the service used to URL encode special characters in email addresses to prevent issues with email clients and servers. This was done to ensure that email addresses could be sent and received correctly, even if they contained special characters like spaces, ampersands, or equals signs.

The URL encoding scheme used by Hotmail was a custom implementation, which is now known as "Hotmail URL encoding" or "Hotmail encoding". It's a bit different from the standard URL encoding scheme used by most web applications today.

Here's an example of how Hotmail URL encoded an email address:

Original email address: [email protected] Hotmail URL encoded email address: john%2e%2e%40example%2ecom

As you can see, Hotmail replaced the dot (.) with %2e and the @ symbol with %40. This was done to ensure that the email address could be sent and received correctly.

To decode a Hotmail URL encoded email address, you can use the following steps:

1. Replace %2e with a dot (.)
2. Replace %40 with the @ symbol
3. Remove any other % followed by two hexadecimal digits (e.g., %20 becomes a space)

Using these steps, you can decode the example email address above:

Hotmail URL encoded email address: john%2e%2e%40example%2ecom Decoded email address: [email protected]

Keep in mind that Hotmail's URL encoding scheme is no longer used by Microsoft, and it's not recommended to use it for new applications. However, if you need to decode old Hotmail URL encoded email addresses, you can use the steps above.