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Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

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1–10 of 115 posts

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#4
post #2

> The world is changing, and we need to adapt and understand it. fastmail: read my lips: I pay you because you offer a traditional email service if you add a single AI feature I will return to self hosting

+1 as a fastmail family account customer.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#5
post #2

> The world is changing, and we need to adapt and understand it. fastmail: read my lips: I pay you because you offer a traditional email service if you add a single AI feature I will return to self hosting

+1 as a fastmail family account customer.

Same here. Fastmail customer for slowly peeling myself away from gmail. Just keep giving me reliable email service and I'll pay you.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#6
post #2

> The world is changing, and we need to adapt and understand it. fastmail: read my lips: I pay you because you offer a traditional email service if you add a single AI feature I will return to self hosting

And all these services doubling or even trippeling their price to offer the same thing ... but with AI! I'd happily pay fastmail double the price, without the AI.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#7
"An email is your copy, and the sender can’t revise it later."

Sort of. They can't change plain text, but modern emails often include vast swaths of remote content. When you open the message, it retrieves the relevant assets directly from whoever sent the email. That remote content is not permanently stored. It's cached for a bit and will not be re-used if the email is opened months or years later.

If those assets disappear or are changed, there's very little any email provider can do about that.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#8
post #3

Interesting take. I have decades worth of email archived, so it does ring true for me at least. I doubt anything in there is more interesting to Big Brother but who knows?

Interesting to federal government, not likely. Interesting to marketers and scammers, absolutely.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#9

"An email is your copy, and the sender can’t revise it later." Sort of. They can't change plain text, but modern emails often include vast swaths of remote content. When you open the message, it retrieves the relevant assets directly from whoever sent the email. That remote content is not permanently stored . It's cached for a bit and will not be re-used if the email is opened months or years later. If those assets d…

The provider could create a snapshot at receive and/or open (fetching these potentially mutable asset dependencies within a message), similar to what https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep and https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile do with url bookmarks, and attach it (or otherwise associate it) to the message. Optional of course.

The benefit of this is senders couldn't treat it as a read receipt, because the provider can state "Our infra performs this operation for the user for immutability purposes" similar to other email operations that proxy these requests for privacy purposes.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#10

"An email is your copy, and the sender can’t revise it later." Sort of. They can't change plain text, but modern emails often include vast swaths of remote content. When you open the message, it retrieves the relevant assets directly from whoever sent the email. That remote content is not permanently stored . It's cached for a bit and will not be re-used if the email is opened months or years later. If those assets d…

Modern marketing emails, yes… not emails written as correspondence. I don't think this post is talking about marketing emails.
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