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Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

neilzone.co.uk

151–160 of 377 posts

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not opt-in for the owner of the network, who should really have a say in the matter. Why? It’s literally just a shortcut for asking for the password from someone who already has it and then having it read it out loud or texted. If the owner of the network doesn’t want that happening they need to explain that in either case.

It’s a shortcut that deprives the network owner of agency. As the person running the network, should you not have some degree of control over who gets to join your network, be it fully open, fully closed, or anywhere in between?

You have that control: allowlist individual devices

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but you turning it off doesn't occur in a vacuum. Slack is a communication program. Either it then has to disregard reactions from other people, which is potentially a situation where someone will acknowledge your message and you will not be notified of that fact, or they then have to simply prevent reactions on any messages you yourself send, which is going to prompt a question from the coworkers using the spac…

Slack should add an option to disable reactions for people like this. However, since the sender is expecting their reaction to be seen, Slack should then replace the reaction with a text message matching the reaction: "Ok emoji", "Thumbs up emoji", "Smile face emoji", etc. so that the reaction doesn't just disappear and the intended recipient sees it.

This is the worst possible outcome - now if I’m in a channel with someone who doesn’t like reactions for unarticulated reasons, I am subjected to these notifications and unnecessary clutter? Bollocks.

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#153
post #65

This kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have, where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device's contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sens... It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it's just one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.

This was a good feature. Thankfully it still exists in iOS. Just requires approval.

The iOS implementation of this feature is perfect.

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#155
post #65

This kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have, where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device's contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sens... It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it's just one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.

This just reminds me of my theory of Microsoft's checklist-driven development: Some PM writes down some single-sentence description of a feature (e.g. "Share Wi-Fi passwords with contacts") and the developers just read the list and find the single least-effort way of implementing it. Once done, they can tick the item off the list and go home having done their job, although often in the most excruciatingly stupid way by damaging their users' experience. I do not see how else could M$ so often add features in a way that actively make their products worse to use.

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#156

Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is

Two issues: It's not a standard, Microsoft just did this with the assumption that most people are using Outlook anyway. They didn't care how this would work for everyone else.

Secondly: What does it mean to get a reaction to an email? Can I interpret your "thumbs up" as a sign to go ahead with something, or is it just an "acknowledge, I got your email". If we more or less agree at this point that email are "for serious business" then we must treat it as such and provide clear and precise communication. Reactions are the opposite of that, they are more easily interpreted wrong, depending on context, culture or mood or the recipient.

There might be a really good and reasonable use for "reactions" in emails, but I seriously doubt that Microsoft went all in and made their UI/UX experts do the research and those researchers came back with a clear answer that this was great and here's how to implement it. Given that this isn't even a standard I feel like it's something someone did on a Friday afternoon to show that you could done it. The piggy-backing on SMTP headers have all the hallmarks of a hack.

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that article: > (So if you want to opt out of Google Maps and Wi-Fi Sense at the same time, you must change your SSID of, say, myhouse to myhouse_optout_nomap. Technology is great.) I knew about the Google Maps thing, I didn't know about this. That kind of stuff is so presumptuous and user hostile it's outrageous.

Yep. My WiFi has had _optout_nomap ever since it was introduced. People always ask me why and I've never seen another SSID with it included.

Come over to my place and we can possibly be the first people ever to bond over their home wifi SSIDs ;)

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#159
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TNEF is a container/encapsulation format rather than a markup language. It can contain HTML as well as RTF and plain text. Granted HTML rendering of email is full of quirks in Outlook

It's using Word to render html. They tried using a browser engine but then it rendered a copy-pasted Word text differently and users hated that.

Now that they are transitioning the desktop version of Outlook into an Electron-like webview, I suppose showing HTML directly in the webview is out of the question, and they must be using the Javascript version of Word to render HTML...

Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that article: > (So if you want to opt out of Google Maps and Wi-Fi Sense at the same time, you must change your SSID of, say, myhouse to myhouse_optout_nomap. Technology is great.) I knew about the Google Maps thing, I didn't know about this. That kind of stuff is so presumptuous and user hostile it's outrageous.

Would it be better to have an op-out database, where you have to log in with a Google account, and prove that you own the device somehow using geolocation? The system has to be resistant against bad actors taking someone else off the map who chooses to opt in. It would be better if the syntax were simpler, like changing myhouse to __myhouse (double underscore == private identifier). By setting SSID a certain way, you…

no it would be great if you had to prove you own the device to opt-in.
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