How a single email can badly break your Android email app

Security researcher Hector Marco has uncovered an interesting attack that can be launched against users of some versions of the stock Android email app.

Marco discovered that all an attacker has to do is send an email with a specially-crafted header, and they can cause the email Android app to crash.

Worse still, reopening the app will just cause it to crash again, because every time the app attempts to download the malicious email it will keep triggering the same fault.

Gmail crash
This is, effectively, a denial of service attack. Albeit one that prevents you from easily accessing your email rather than an attack which clogs up your website and causes it to fall over.

Android email iconFortunately, there is an easy solution. The most obvious is to log into the web version of your email and delete the offending email there. Your Android mail app will no longer attempt to download the email (because it has been zapped) and so won't see any offending email headers that might cause it to trip over itself.