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● 10.27.22

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●● E-mail is Simple, Secure and Robust If Decentralised and Treated as Text, Not as Web Pages (Also, Webmail is Regressive)

Posted in Google, Protocol, Security at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 9f1cb3590e5f61ccf065a38724f37fe0E-mail is Not Web Pages Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

=> ↺ Video download link

http://techrights.org/videos/email-is-not-html.webm

Summary: E-mail has become a sordid mess; even though E-mail by far predates the Web (nowadays it’s almost exclusively the latter) what many folks refer to as E-mail is basically some Web site and messages are in fact Web pages, not text

LAST night we wrote about Google's ongoing attack on E-mail, both as a protocol and as a service. Think of Gmail as an attack on E-mail, much in the same way that GitHub is an attack on Git. Gmail is not E-mail. Protocols and obstacles (for relays to please) are added all the time and when it comes to reading E-mail, nowadays people are expected to use “apps” that can’t even cope with plain-text E-mail (which is how Git is traditionally managed; Bugzilla can be the same). There’s an effort to herd people into sites like Googlemail/Gmail and Microsoft/GitHub, presenting them with JavaScript (typically proprietary) disguised as pages instead of simple text. This is bad for usability, security, and all sorts of other basic ‘fitness-for-purpose’ criteria. Ask a blind person about accessibility of GitLab, which became very little but a big pile of JavaScript.

=> Google's ongoing attack on E-mail

The video above concerns this article about webmail problems. It offers “many reasons not to use “webmail” in place of e-mail — a case for commodity services, open standards, and free choice of client software” as our associate put it this morning.

=> ↺ this article

E-mail is a simple protocol that predates the Web. Let’s not impose HTML and the Web on E-mail users. We’re ruining things. █

References:

Military Intelligence? DoD finally (FINALLY) bans HTML e-mail | TechRepublic

=> 1 Military Intelligence? DoD finally (FINALLY) bans HTML e-mail | TechRepublic

Why NOT to use HTML in e-mail

=> 2 Why NOT to use HTML in e-mail

HTML e-mail not worth the risk | Network World

=> 3 HTML e-mail not worth the risk | Network World

Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea

=> 4 Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea

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