[geeks] Email: Dead as we knew it

[Robert Toegel]

I can see your point.  I thought I was being anal when the "play video"
buttons are not playing videos but sending you to some link somewhere "out
there" and I was getting ticked about it.  As far as the information
demands, I either just bail out because it's not worth it or give them a
fake name (last name is "Off", guess the first initial), the address of a
parking lot and a phone number I had five decades ago.  My morning ritual
is deleting the thirty-five to fifty emails so I can read the two or three
that are worthwhile.  I'm not an IT guy, just a hobby interest but it's not
getting to be fun anymore.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 13:06 Jonathan Patschke via geeks <geeks at sunhelp.org>
wrote:

>
> It's the usual story of the marketing folks ruining the Internet for the
> geeks, but what's happening with email makes me particularly sad.
>
> It wasn't that long ago that all the "industry analysts" were
> telling us that email was dead and only for "old people," while anyone
> they saw in a viable tarket market was using social media, instant
> messaging, etc.  That's fine.  I was over here happily using email for
> hundreds of messages per day.
>
> Email's gotten a lot worse just in the last year or two, though.
>
> The plain-text portion of email is entirely neglected anymore.
> Sometimes it's just an exact copy (including markup) of the HTML stuff.
> Sometimes it's badly-unmarked HTML with HTML-encoded Unicode characters,
> corrupted URLs, and out-of-order text (because of the lack of CSS).
>
> Somtimes, hilariously, the plain-text portion of the message doesn't
> match the HTML at all.  I've gotten mail from a brokerage about some
> already-passed tax deadline, only to find out it was actually supposed
> to be a message about a new trading feature they were offering.  They'd
> reused an old plain-text part in constructing the message.
>
> That's not great, but alpine does an admirable job of rendering HTML in
> a terminal-friendly way, so I can cope.
>
> Almost every message I get that isn't personal correspondence is run
> through an obfuscator that hides all the URLs in it, adding tracking
> details, making them useless for sharing as well as adding a security
> hole that just doesn't need to be there ;the older "UTM" convention for
> link-tracking kept the readability of URLs and didn't funnel all
> requests through a trampoline, but--oh no--someone might remove the
> parameters and deflate the statistics by some miniscule amount!
>
> I used to reply to most of these, and even engaged what a couple of
> companies in what seemed like promising conversations as to how they're
> setting themselves up for tragedy if that single-point-of-failure ever
> gets compromised (or even just if it gets a malicious link injected).
> It's happened before--even to Google.
>
> The conversations all died out.  Now my complaints aren't even heard
> anymore.
>
> The web normalized rude interactions between individuals and between
> developers and visitors.  If any of us walked into a shop only to have
> some clerk cover our eyes and prevent us from walking further before
> giving contact details, we'd gut-punch the jerk and storm out.  Yet,
> this is the normal sort of interaction between a visitor and most blogs,
> most medium-scale commercial sites, and even a few large ones.
>
> Now they're bringing that lack of tact to my mailbox, just as the
> spammers and joe-jobbers before them.
>
> I have no solutions, no noble action to improve things.  Just needed to
> whine a bit.  I can't feel like we (the geeks) built this thing, invited
> the rest of the world into "our house," and then got shoved out the back
> door so that we can watch them wreck the place.
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Patschke
> Austin, TX
> USA
>
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks_sunhelp.org
>
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