10.27.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

E-mail is Simple, Secure and Robust If Decentralised and Treated as Text, Not as Web Pages (Also, Webmail is Regressive)

Posted in Google, Protocol, Security at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 9f1cb3590e5f61ccf065a38724f37fe0
E-mail is Not Web Pages
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: E-mail has become a sordid mess; even though E-mail by far predates the Web (nowadays it’s almost exclusively the latter) what many folks refer to as E-mail is basically some Web site and messages are in fact Web pages, not text

LAST night we wrote about Google's ongoing attack on E-mail, both as a protocol and as a service. Think of Gmail as an attack on E-mail, much in the same way that GitHub is an attack on Git. Gmail is not E-mail. Protocols and obstacles (for relays to please) are added all the time and when it comes to reading E-mail, nowadays people are expected to use “apps” that can’t even cope with plain-text E-mail (which is how Git is traditionally managed; Bugzilla can be the same). There’s an effort to herd people into sites like Googlemail/Gmail and Microsoft/GitHub, presenting them with JavaScript (typically proprietary) disguised as pages instead of simple text. This is bad for usability, security, and all sorts of other basic ‘fitness-for-purpose’ criteria. Ask a blind person about accessibility of GitLab, which became very little but a big pile of JavaScript.

The video above concerns this article about webmail problems. It offers “many reasons not to use “webmail” in place of e-mail — a case for commodity services, open standards, and free choice of client software” as our associate put it this morning.

E-mail is a simple protocol that predates the Web. Let’s not impose HTML and the Web on E-mail users. We’re ruining things. █

References:

  1. Military Intelligence? DoD finally (FINALLY) bans HTML e-mail | TechRepublic
  2. Why NOT to use HTML in e-mail
  3. HTML e-mail not worth the risk | Network World
  4. Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea
  5. The Ascii Ribbon Campaign official homepage
  6. 7 reasons why HTML email is a bad thing
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