In user research, we’ve seen users copy/pasting the contents of the
inbound SMS page into a spreadsheet, in order to keep a record of the
messages they receive. They even went as far as to write a macro which
fixed the errors caused by copying and pasting.
It would be much easier if we just gave them the data already in a
spreadsheet format. Which is what this commit does.
One caveat is that, because spreadsheets can contain executable code (ie
formulas), and because we’re populating the spreadsheet with
user-submitted data (albeit via SMS) we need to be careful about
injection attacks.
The details of how these attacks work are detailed here (interesting
reading): http://georgemauer.net/2017/10/07/csv-injection.html
The mitigation is to not allow characters which initialise a formula
at the start of the cell.
c9b2211bd3