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>This page ranks email clients based on their support among the 182 HTML and CSS features No thanks. I still recoil at the sight of a read-receipt and the onl

>This page ranks email clients based on their support among the 182 HTML and CSS features No thanks. I still recoil at the sight of a read-receipt and the only reason most companies include any of this dreck in an email in 2021 is to either track me or market to me. make email text again.

breakfastduck 5y ago
You can track people through CSS?
- hanche 5y ago
  Specify a background image?
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    Was a genuine question
    - hanche 5y ago
      I intended it as a genuine answer. Sorry if it appeared a bit snarky. To expand a bit: With css, you can specify a background image to any document element. Something like this, where the url serves to identify you: div.foo { background-image: url('https://example.com/bar.png?t=deadbeef') } But as zeroimpl says in a cousin post, you can do it directly with an image tag, no css needed.
- FranchuFranchu 5y ago
  Load a background image and store the IPs that asked for it.
  - zeroimpl 5y ago
    You could also do that even better with plain <img> tags, so that's not really a special attack vector.
  - Breza 5y ago
    No need to store IPs, just embed PII in the URL for the background image. With email, IP addresses aren't very useful for tracking.
tzs 5y ago
> make email text again That ship sailed the instant it got named "email" instead of something like "etelegram". With mail, I can send anything that my printer can print, which is everything my word processor can handle (fonts, text decoration, foreground and background colors, inline images, graphs, tables, and more) and attach anything that fits in the envelope (a CD-ROM of arbitrary data in any format). It was inevitable that email would end up being able to handle the electronic equivalent of all those things. The problem with email is not that it now handles more than just plain text. The problem is that there was no early agreement on how to handle those things, so different implementors came up with different ways to do it, which eventually converged on using HTML. Not because HTML was necessarily the best way to do it, but because it was something they all already implemented for other things or was already available on the systems their mail clients ran on. But modern HTML engines are designed for the web, so there still really needs to be some sort of agreement on a subset of HTML that handles the things necessary to make email like mail, without including things that make sense for the web but not for mail.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  No one knows if I opened a letter or threw it in a trash can.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    But if it was sent registered they can at least know that you received it. And from what I gather, the consensus of most jurisprudence is that given you received it, throwing it away unopened is on you.
    - ksolanki 5y ago
      So if someone wants a “read receipt” they should pay, and the recipient should have the right to receive or not. That should work to each party’s satisfaction.
    - EricE 5y ago
      registered return receipt signature required - maybe you can prove who received it. Just sending something registered won't help your jurisprudence :p
surround 5y ago
If companies want to have inline images in their emails, they should have to send the image data along with the rest of the message. Email clients should not allow emails to load third party resources.
- stephenr 5y ago
  What, so that the client has literally no choice of not showing the images, even you just want to view the text version? Good email clients already provide a very simple solution: a user option to disable loading remote content, with a per-message option to load it. Your suggestion would mean that my mail client has to download a ridiculously larger volume of data than it does now.

breakfastduck 5y ago

You can track people through CSS?

hanche 5y ago
Specify a background image?
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Was a genuine question
  - hanche 5y ago
    I intended it as a genuine answer. Sorry if it appeared a bit snarky. To expand a bit: With css, you can specify a background image to any document element. Something like this, where the url serves to identify you: div.foo { background-image: url('https://example.com/bar.png?t=deadbeef') } But as zeroimpl says in a cousin post, you can do it directly with an image tag, no css needed.
FranchuFranchu 5y ago
Load a background image and store the IPs that asked for it.
- zeroimpl 5y ago
  You could also do that even better with plain <img> tags, so that's not really a special attack vector.
- Breza 5y ago
  No need to store IPs, just embed PII in the URL for the background image. With email, IP addresses aren't very useful for tracking.

tzs 5y ago

> make email text again That ship sailed the instant it got named "email" instead of something like "etelegram". With mail, I can send anything that my printer can print, which is everything my word processor can handle (fonts, text decoration, foreground and background colors, inline images, graphs, tables, and more) and attach anything that fits in the envelope (a CD-ROM of arbitrary data in any format). It was inevitable that email would end up being able to handle the electronic equivalent of all those things. The problem with email is not that it now handles more than just plain text. The problem is that there was no early agreement on how to handle those things, so different implementors came up with different ways to do it, which eventually converged on using HTML. Not because HTML was necessarily the best way to do it, but because it was something they all already implemented for other things or was already available on the systems their mail clients ran on. But modern HTML engines are designed for the web, so there still really needs to be some sort of agreement on a subset of HTML that handles the things necessary to make email like mail, without including things that make sense for the web but not for mail.

systemvoltage 5y ago
No one knows if I opened a letter or threw it in a trash can.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  But if it was sent registered they can at least know that you received it. And from what I gather, the consensus of most jurisprudence is that given you received it, throwing it away unopened is on you.
  - ksolanki 5y ago
    So if someone wants a “read receipt” they should pay, and the recipient should have the right to receive or not. That should work to each party’s satisfaction.
  - EricE 5y ago
    registered return receipt signature required - maybe you can prove who received it. Just sending something registered won't help your jurisprudence :p

surround 5y ago

If companies want to have inline images in their emails, they should have to send the image data along with the rest of the message. Email clients should not allow emails to load third party resources.

stephenr 5y ago
What, so that the client has literally no choice of not showing the images, even you just want to view the text version? Good email clients already provide a very simple solution: a user option to disable loading remote content, with a per-message option to load it. Your suggestion would mean that my mail client has to download a ridiculously larger volume of data than it does now.