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Hey coderdude, these are awesome points. A few things, since we pull everything into our email reactor we can run spam filters on the content sent to us, so wh

Hey coderdude, these are awesome points. A few things, since we pull everything into our email reactor we can run spam filters on the content sent to us, so while this wont be 100% effective we think we can scale this technology with some practice. Second, we already run malware and anti virus scans on everything sent to us, again this is not 100% bullet proof but since we're using gmail as a back end email appliance its not bad so far.

coderdude 15y ago
That's quite a burden to take on (and quite a technical challenge to get right). I wish you luck. One more thing I wanted to find out about. How do you handle email signatures? When someone comments on a task in BaseCamp (via email) the entire email is posted to the thread, including their signature and whatever little images they included (photograph, or Facebook/Twitter icons). Is there anything you can do about that? Gmail seems to be pretty good at detecting the boilerplate part of a message -- possibly only after having seen one message from the user. This would be an important thing to nail. Edit: What if you want to lock a page down so that only you or a select few may email updates? I would probably want that for at least one of the pages. Now that I'm thinking about it, the lack of registration is possibly due to how hard it would be to authenticate a user via easily-spoofed email. You might be able to come up with a sort of "secret key" that you add anywhere in the email but I could see that not working out for your average user.
- dotmatrix22 15y ago
  Your personal email is never disclosed to anyone so there is no way for a spambot to ping back our users. As for handling spam, yes it is a challenge but something we plan on doing to prevent spam is sending automatic authentication links to accounts we believe are posting a high volume in a short period of time. The authentication link will lead them back to a page that requires them to fill out a different captcha for each link. Finally with regards to signatures, there is definitely OER software that exists that we can test out handling signatures and images inside the email itself.
  - coderdude 15y ago
    I wasn't so much worried about the spammers finding their way back to me, but my spam finding its way to you. :) (via infection of course) The authentication link is a good idea. They can still post non-automated messages (and automated messages if they find the right lib for breaking captchas) but at the very least it will give you a way to keep a close eye on suspicious activity. Someone starts triggering the captcha? Take a look at what they do.
    - dotmatrix22 15y ago
      This is all great feedback! BTW, if you have any ideas or ways to combat future issues like these would love to learn from you.
      - coderdude 15y ago
        Glad I could help. I'll ping you if any other ideas come to mind.
suprasanna 15y ago
dotmatrix22, I'd like to chat with you about how you're handling things - I'm working on a startup that is leveraging this in a similar way and I'd like to see if you can help us out as a consultant. Shoot me an email (under my profile).

coderdude 15y ago

That's quite a burden to take on (and quite a technical challenge to get right). I wish you luck. One more thing I wanted to find out about. How do you handle email signatures? When someone comments on a task in BaseCamp (via email) the entire email is posted to the thread, including their signature and whatever little images they included (photograph, or Facebook/Twitter icons). Is there anything you can do about that? Gmail seems to be pretty good at detecting the boilerplate part of a message -- possibly only after having seen one message from the user. This would be an important thing to nail. Edit: What if you want to lock a page down so that only you or a select few may email updates? I would probably want that for at least one of the pages. Now that I'm thinking about it, the lack of registration is possibly due to how hard it would be to authenticate a user via easily-spoofed email. You might be able to come up with a sort of "secret key" that you add anywhere in the email but I could see that not working out for your average user.

dotmatrix22 15y ago
Your personal email is never disclosed to anyone so there is no way for a spambot to ping back our users. As for handling spam, yes it is a challenge but something we plan on doing to prevent spam is sending automatic authentication links to accounts we believe are posting a high volume in a short period of time. The authentication link will lead them back to a page that requires them to fill out a different captcha for each link. Finally with regards to signatures, there is definitely OER software that exists that we can test out handling signatures and images inside the email itself.
- coderdude 15y ago
  I wasn't so much worried about the spammers finding their way back to me, but my spam finding its way to you. :) (via infection of course) The authentication link is a good idea. They can still post non-automated messages (and automated messages if they find the right lib for breaking captchas) but at the very least it will give you a way to keep a close eye on suspicious activity. Someone starts triggering the captcha? Take a look at what they do.
  - dotmatrix22 15y ago
    This is all great feedback! BTW, if you have any ideas or ways to combat future issues like these would love to learn from you.
    - coderdude 15y ago
      Glad I could help. I'll ping you if any other ideas come to mind.

suprasanna 15y ago

dotmatrix22, I'd like to chat with you about how you're handling things - I'm working on a startup that is leveraging this in a similar way and I'd like to see if you can help us out as a consultant. Shoot me an email (under my profile).