Semi-related: emails can often give away more information than you might intend. At one of my previous employers, it was quite easy to get a general idea of how internal development was progressing “from the outside” by keeping track of who was testing which version of a prerelease OS via proxy of the information it would leave in the emails they sent.
Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#32I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…
Modern JavaScript/TypeScript is fine. Especially when compared to Perl, of all languages.
I disagree. JavaScript is one of those languages who's default failure mode seems to be to pretend everything worked and just produce nonsensical results.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
who cares, it's just a 100-line long script that probably won't be maintained or used anymore
It would be more readable in almost any other widespread language, and I'm saying that as someone who does a lot of JS.
This is quickly changing. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I seem to come across a lot more scripts online in Node for some reason. And by 'scripts' I mean reproducers to various issues, such as triggering error state in an app I was working on.
At first, I thought it was crazy. It kinda makes sense though, JS seems to be growing extremely fast.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#34Wow those pie charts are almost impossible to read! I've never seen such a small font in a chart that readers are expected to understand easily.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#35I must admit that I was a bit shocked when I realized that the author had used javascript for this task. At first I assumed that he was scripting some webmail interface but then I saw that he was using 'emailjs-imap-client'. I understand that people use what they're familiar with and there seems to be a vibrant ecosystem for JS outside of the browser but it'll never not be weird seeing it take over what would once ha…
who cares, it's just a 100-line long script that probably won't be maintained or used anymore
I'm not sure I could count the number of 100-line long throwaway scripts that I wrote that are still being used in production systems before I realized how dangerous that idea is and stopped treating any code as throwaway code. If I show my code to another human, there's a chance it will end up in production.
The Pragmatic Programmer says to throw away prototypes, but in practice it always seems easier to click the merge button than to rewrite working code.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be more readable in almost any other widespread language, and I'm saying that as someone who does a lot of JS.
This is quickly changing. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I seem to come across a lot more scripts online in Node for some reason. And by 'scripts' I mean reproducers to various issues, such as triggering error state in an app I was working on. At first, I thought it was crazy. It kinda makes sense though, JS seems to be growing extremely fast.
Just because more people are using it does not mean it is more readable. Footguns about in JS and it is remarkably easy to read the same code over and over again and not see them because of it.
Readable languages are the kinds where not only do you understand what they're trying to do at a quick glance, but also what they actually do.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years back, one of our (Twilio SendGrid's) developer evangelists created an open source Chrome extension to show the icon of the ESP who sent a message in Gmail. The last big Gmail UI update broke it, but most of the ESP identification strategies probably still work: https://github.com/nquinlan/Email-Intelligence/blob/master/c...
This is a brilliant idea, if only it were updated for the latest gmail UI
Chrome extension author here: make a PR and I'll accept it and publish it.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years back, one of our (Twilio SendGrid's) developer evangelists created an open source Chrome extension to show the icon of the ESP who sent a message in Gmail. The last big Gmail UI update broke it, but most of the ESP identification strategies probably still work: https://github.com/nquinlan/Email-Intelligence/blob/master/c...
OMG, this sounds like a massive security risk. That nice developer could easily siphon off all the email to his backend server with this little extension. I install almost no extensions because they are too risky.
Chrome sandboxes fetch requests from extensions and tells the user what permissions the app is requesting, so it’s not actually that bad (barring bugs in the sandbox)
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
OMG, this sounds like a massive security risk. That nice developer could easily siphon off all the email to his backend server with this little extension. I install almost no extensions because they are too risky.
Chrome sandboxes fetch requests from extensions and tells the user what permissions the app is requesting, so it’s not actually that bad (barring bugs in the sandbox)
What do you mean with "sandboxes fetch requests"? That's not a valid countermeasure at all...
The grandparent was worried about the extension stealing his email's contents.
Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be more readable in almost any other widespread language, and I'm saying that as someone who does a lot of JS.
This is quickly changing. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I seem to come across a lot more scripts online in Node for some reason. And by 'scripts' I mean reproducers to various issues, such as triggering error state in an app I was working on. At first, I thought it was crazy. It kinda makes sense though, JS seems to be growing extremely fast.
As someone who has worked in Javascript basically since Javascript was invented, it's been "quickly changing" that entire time, and the majority of the changes have made things worse, not better. It used to be that you could trace your code through 15 layers of callback hell and eventually find the problem. Now there's 10 different syntactic sugars around callbacks, so you get to save a few characters of typing and then trace your bugs through 50 layers of callback hell, most of which are in some 0.0.1-alpha-versioned promise library which may actually just be a XSS attack. Improvement? I think not.
Just because more people are doing it, doesn't mean it's improving.
I'll believe things are going in a good direction when `{}.foo` throws an exception in all major JS implementations. But I'm not optimistic about that ever happening.
My only hope for JavaScript right now is that it might die because WebAssembly lets a reasonable language achieve dominance.