Re: No subset for email

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 09:25:30 +0200, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> rendering email in a rectangular part of the screen isn't enough.
> It's also necessary to reply (including quoting) and to display
> excerpts of the message.

I would imagine a quote element of some kind wrapping the original elements would suit? Would you prefer non-destructive editing, say by applying a CSS style showing/hiding selections highlighted original text?

> Second, what good would such security settings have? There isn't any 
> trusted origin in email, so an attacker can just use foo@trusteddomaiin 
> as sender and score an immediate goal. (I'm sure tools like 
> Spamassassin could use the message's level to increase the spam score 
> corresponding to the developers spam corpii, but that hardly seems like 
> enough justification for such a feature.)

I meant something different from trust regarding security. To prevent malformed code exploits, the user, the user's client or the user's ISP's mailserver could reject invalid markup.

To allow a more graduated level of security, against phishing, a user stylesheet could be applied to show all hyperlink URLs, perhaps using rules to highlight (or eliminate) those that matched certain patterns.

This can be combined with user preference, so that media objects could be replaced by their text alternates. Perhaps users could opt to only download an abstract (a short descriptive section) of classes of email, in the way that RSS functions. In other words, an email format may be transformed under a rule based system on the mailserver before it gets downloaded to the client.

A categorization element (dc:subject?) could be used for business emails to self-identify to rules. This wouldn't affect spam, but it might be easier to create sets of preferences for legitimate use. 


Tavis

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Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2007 21:57:11 UTC