In the admin page for sending email I get this warning:

"The Back Button has been DISABLE while HTML WYSIWG Editor is turned ON, WHY? - Because if you click the back button to edit your HTML email, The PHP (php.ini - "Magic Quotes = On") will automatically add "\\\\" backslashes everywhere Double Quotes " appear (HTML uses them in Links, Images and More) and this destorts the HTML and the pictures will dissapear once you submit the email again, If you turn OFF WYSIWYG Editor in Admin the HTML Ability of osCommerce is also turned OFF and the back button will re-appear. A fix for this HTML and PHP issue would be nice if someone knows a solution Iv'e tried. If you really need to Preview your emails before sending them, use the Preview Button located on the WYSIWYG Editor."

In order to remove the magic quotes on a page (say if you're in a shared server environment), add this to an .htaccess file to override the magic quotes

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off

This .htaccess directive should turn magic quotes off, thus eliminating your problem with using the back button. (Note: You may have to modify the php code as well to turn the back button on -- I haven't looked at the code yet)

I had initially posted this in the bugtracker thinking that Michael had written that message asking for suggestions, but apparently he didn't write it as he closed the issue claiming it wasn't a bug. In my mind, anything that looks that unprofessional by asking people for suggestions is a bug -- whether Michael wrote it, or the makers of oscommerce wrote it. But apparently Michael doesn't think so.

This problem would be easily fixable if he'd just add the magic quotes directive override to the .htaccess file in the admin and make the changes to remove this problem for everyone as this .htaccess directive does nothing if the magic quotes are already turned off by the php.ini file. Hopefully, oscommerce doesn't rely on magic quotes by now as that is deprecated coding, so turning off the magic quotes hopefully isn't an issue, but I haven't nosed around the oscommerce code enough to know for sure. Seeing as he didn't mention this as being a problem when he closed the bug report, I presume that it is not. Either way, it appears that Michael would rather make you fix it yourself. Hence I post this info here.