Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The only safe email is text-only email

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#41

Post by Moru »

neals wrote: post #34
userbinator wrote: post #32

I've noticed that "if it's not plaintext, it gets deleted without being read" seems to be a pretty common rule among Germans on the Internet, who also have a tendency to like specifying very exactly what they want of email to them. Here's a few examples: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/email.en.htm http://problemkaputt.de/email.htm https://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/email-to-mn.html http://www.karo-electronics.de…

This is the most German thing I've seen since Octoberfest 2016. It seems weird to me to have to find out the preferred way of communication to this level of detail, I already loathe that one cient of mine that only uses Facebook messenger for all communication.

Thunderbird has settings for each of your contacts for this reason. You can set if they want HTML or text only mails.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#42

Post by proactivesvcs »

stephenr wrote: post #29

I've always thought native handling of markdown for email would be pretty cool. The MUA could strip out any HTML embedded in the actual markdown, render to HTML locally (for display) and you have nice formatting without the risks or cruft of email HTML. And of course if you choose to view in text only mode, you don't actually lose any semantic meaning.

In plain text, Thunderbird recognises * and / as bold and italic, which sometimes produces interesting results for badly-formatted multi-part emails.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#43

Post by proactivesvcs »

alkonaut wrote: post #30

This might be true, but I think that ship has sailed. Email for 99% of internet users is html. Thinking that some large fraction of news letters, outlook emails will ever be plaintext is just naive. I use html emails in outlook simply because I don't want my emails within the corporation to appear differnet from anyone elses. I certainly don't want to return something that looks different from what the sender wrote,.…

Over 99.5% of the email I receive is either plaintext or renders perfectly legible in plain. This suggests that a large fraction of newsletters are already plaintext. The mail client is primarily a program to display and send email. The web browser is a web browser.

If the user wants safety, switching to plaintext is a very wide step forward.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#44

Post by proactivesvcs »

ameliaquining wrote: post #8

This is silly. The authors establish that phishing is a serious problem (duh), and that this problem is caused by the absence of reliable authentication of messages (a worthwhile observation, albeit one that the industry is already aware of and doing its best to patch over), but they fail to establish that text-only email solves this problem in any meaningful way. Text-only emails can and will still contain links, wh…

A small, but not insignificant, proportion of malware and phishing emails I receive do not show any links at all in their plaintext part. Some of the links are probably easy to skim over and miss the fact they're suspect, but some really do look very dodgy indeed (coupled with very poor plaintext formatting), facts that I would expect a non-expert would notice in some cases. Certainly enough to make it worthwhile.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#45

Post by proactivesvcs »

toast0 wrote: post #20
diggernet wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I gather that non-text emails make it possible to disguise the link target when you hover over it to see where the link goes. Whether that is using css or js, I'm not sure.

On mobile, there's no hover, so HTML mail means I just have to guess if I think the link will go where it says or not.

Considering how much email is checked on mobile I am surprised your point is not being mentioned more frequently.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#47

Post by gkya »

ElectronShak wrote: post #26

I think this is entirely dependent on the context of that particular E-mail. Email has evolved quite a lot. A good example is a newsletter from say, Quora or Medium; Newsletters usually have links to a story or a news feed article. If this was done using plain text, the link would be one long mashup of characters, because they usually include an authentication token or something like that. In this case, using an html…

> A good example is a newsletter from say, Quora or Medium; Newsletters usually have links to a story or a news feed article. If this was done using plain text, the link would be one long mashup of characters, because they usually include an authentication token or something like that. In this case, using an html link or button is clearly the better option.

Well, that's a yet more hostile thing that one has to put up with. I follow news through newsletters, and I'd prefer they were in plain text and with normal links. My reader knows how to wrap lines and make link-like things in plain text clickable. But unfortunately if I wanted to enforce that I'd have to avoid news...

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#48

Post by billysielu »

userbinator wrote: post #32

I've noticed that "if it's not plaintext, it gets deleted without being read" seems to be a pretty common rule among Germans on the Internet, who also have a tendency to like specifying very exactly what they want of email to them. Here's a few examples: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/email.en.htm http://problemkaputt.de/email.htm https://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/email-to-mn.html http://www.karo-electronics.de…

I automatically delete anything with an attachment, that's so effective I didn't bother going any further with it.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#49

Post by alkonaut »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #43
alkonaut wrote: post #30

This might be true, but I think that ship has sailed. Email for 99% of internet users is html. Thinking that some large fraction of news letters, outlook emails will ever be plaintext is just naive. I use html emails in outlook simply because I don't want my emails within the corporation to appear differnet from anyone elses. I certainly don't want to return something that looks different from what the sender wrote,.…

Over 99.5% of the email I receive is either plaintext or renders perfectly legible in plain. This suggests that a large fraction of newsletters are already plaintext. The mail client is primarily a program to display and send email. The web browser is a web browser. If the user wants safety, switching to plaintext is a very wide step forward.

> Over 99.5% of the email I receive is either plaintext or renders perfectly legible in plain.

Is that representative? Where do you get email from? Did you change preferences on things like mailing lists in order to get to that percentage?

Also: what kind of client do you use? iOS mail does send plain text emails as text/plain (which is fantastic) but if you look at e.g. inbox (gmail) it doesn't even allow sending plain text emails as far as I'm aware.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#50

Post by jonssons »

userbinator wrote: post #32

I've noticed that "if it's not plaintext, it gets deleted without being read" seems to be a pretty common rule among Germans on the Internet, who also have a tendency to like specifying very exactly what they want of email to them. Here's a few examples: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/email.en.htm http://problemkaputt.de/email.htm https://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/email-to-mn.html http://www.karo-electronics.de…

Thanks. I love the examples.
Post reply on HN