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User Not Found, Email Drops Silently
shervinafshar writes with an International Herald Tribune story explaining just why it is failed emails don't always result in a helpful error message for the sender, which also gives some insight into ways that email can be used to spy on recipients. "In last lines of the article, two companies are introduced which provide services that can 'spy' on your email reading habits. They also can 'call home' too: 'Some entrepreneurs have seen that uncertainty and offered senders the ability to obtain receipts that a given message has been read — without the recipient knowing that a confirmation has been sent back to the sender. ReadNotify, based in Queensland, Australia, started in 2000 and promised to report not only on whether a message was read, but also on how long it was opened for reading on the recipient's PC. It can also send the message in "self-destructing" form, preventing forwarding, printing, copying and saving.' IHT also is asking its readers to comment about these kind of services being against user privacy."
Try to prevent me from forwarding or printing those bits, and I'll do it just to spite your sniveling ass.
And there's NO way to stop me. If you sends bits to MY computer, using MY libraries, and running MY kernel, those bits are mine to do with as I wish, and I take offense at any attempts to prevent me from doing just that.
Let me know when this works with Pine or GMail. OTOH, my blackberry seems to support self destructing text messages, or maybe it just looses them randomly.
Follow me
Too much trouble for everyday use, but most people have a pretty good idea about who they have to watch out for among their business associates.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
> I agree that it is older than 2000. But it is becoming less of an issue every day. As
> the older machines fail, they will be replaced with newer ones with modern email clients.
Mutt and Gnus are both modern, well-maintained, and available for "modern" machines (unless "modern", to you, means "comes with built-in malware").
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"My mail client is fine because it doesn't load javascript or images.. however it's possible for someone to nuke my entire filesystem or execute anything!"
What kind of crazy priorities do you have?
Also, I use pine -- would someone please share some proof-of-concept? Otherwise I won't have to write my own goddamn text-based email client! Ye gods.
... who use Outlook's "recall email" feature :-)
Do what I did ... "I didn't need to read your email a second time - I got the original off you machine earlier today as you typed it. I *told* you you're running an unsecure OS!"
You'd be surprised how many people fall for it.
If you hate HTML so much, how come you use the web?
If you like your feet so much, how come you don't eat with them?
HTML is just fine for what it is. A way to create linked documents with loosely specified formating. e-mail is not the same thing as a web page and isn't well served by a markup language. When people need to send a formated document then they can mail a web address or a document attachment.
Web bugs in email - just what you want in an attorney's email.
I gather it you don't get many multi-megabyte power point slides containing 2 line jokes from newbie morons. I gather you still use a 110 baud modem, given that a simple quotation character was already too much effort...
I wrote a perl script and cron task that I used to use to send about 30 to 50 read receipts to people who request them. It sends them over the course of a week or two. When people ask about getting all of the read receipts, I tell them, "Every time I open your email it lets you know I read it. Isn't that what you wanted?"
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