What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#261

Post by laumars » Fri, May 17, 2013, 7:24 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #258

laumars wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't fix anything either. Many clients make URLs clickable (even with text-only emails) and even if those clients didn't do that, someone will just copy and paste a URL into the address bar without looking. Given that the average user isn't an expert on domain names, it's not actually that hard to trick them into thinking that face.book.com isn't the same as facebook.com (and even those that are savvy enough…

The very fact that in HTML, a URL can look like a totally legitimate URL (the part between the > and the &lt), and yet the "a href=" could be anything, makes HTML a bad idea for email, where headers can be easily forged. Sure people can (and do) copy and paste, but having it in HTML just makes it that much harder to check a URL. Don't even get me started about the "onmouseover" events that can further obscure the…

I'd already addressed the hypertext argument in this discussion somewhere. And that point is one of the reasons why I want HTML standardised in e-mails, so we can remove the potentially harmful things like that from the e-mail spec and make it simpler for developers to create formated content (that's also safe for the end users) which will be rendered correctly across the various clients.

So yes, I do agree with you that anchor tags are misused in phishing mail, but let's make that a reason to fix the specification rather than just ignoring the issues completely (or worse yet, officially removing HTML and then letting 3rd party developers invent their own broken specs and us ending back exactly where were are now).

As for your comment about mouse over events, you can't have Javascript in HTML e-mails so that point is completely irrelevant.

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#262

Post by eschnou » Sun, May 19, 2013, 11:40 AM UTC

reidrac wrote: post #16

eschnou wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the quote from The Verge is the following: "Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very 'open' XMPP standard that it helped pioneer."

That's for the new Hangouts service. If you can keep using XMPP with your Gmail account, then it's not that terrible. I don't know if it's a forced replacement. We may need to wait for Google's announcement.

They clearly announced that Talk is deprecated and will be replaced by Hangout. See this statement on their developer site: https://developers.google.com/talk/

Re: What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

#263

Post by EvilLook » Mon, May 20, 2013, 11:41 PM UTC

claudius wrote: post #248

pyre wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| No, NNTP. UUCP hasn't been used seriously for | over a decade. Looked it up and it seems you are mostly[1] right. Some time ago, I picked up the notion that most large Usenet networks synced articles between each other using UUCP, but clients used NNTP to pull down articles for reading. Not being a very avid Usenet user, I just took this at face value (also not knowing much about UUCP, like the fact that it used La…

Some people apparently use UUCP-over-SSH to get mails from their remote mailservers to their local ones, because, you know, fetchmail is evil or something.

Or because it allows them to have a disconnected SMTP server that receives mail. It would be the solution that I would use if I had a multi-user mail server on a network that only occasionally dialed up to the Internet to send/receive mail but was otherwise disconnected.