<div dir="auto">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.</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 13:06 Jonathan Patschke via geeks <<a href="mailto:geeks@sunhelp.org">geeks@sunhelp.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
It's the usual story of the marketing folks ruining the Internet for the<br>
geeks, but what's happening with email makes me particularly sad.<br>
<br>
It wasn't that long ago that all the "industry analysts" were<br>
telling us that email was dead and only for "old people," while anyone<br>
they saw in a viable tarket market was using social media, instant<br>
messaging, etc. That's fine. I was over here happily using email for<br>
hundreds of messages per day.<br>
<br>
Email's gotten a lot worse just in the last year or two, though.<br>
<br>
The plain-text portion of email is entirely neglected anymore.<br>
Sometimes it's just an exact copy (including markup) of the HTML stuff.<br>
Sometimes it's badly-unmarked HTML with HTML-encoded Unicode characters,<br>
corrupted URLs, and out-of-order text (because of the lack of CSS).<br>
<br>
Somtimes, hilariously, the plain-text portion of the message doesn't<br>
match the HTML at all. I've gotten mail from a brokerage about some<br>
already-passed tax deadline, only to find out it was actually supposed<br>
to be a message about a new trading feature they were offering. They'd<br>
reused an old plain-text part in constructing the message.<br>
<br>
That's not great, but alpine does an admirable job of rendering HTML in<br>
a terminal-friendly way, so I can cope.<br>
<br>
Almost every message I get that isn't personal correspondence is run<br>
through an obfuscator that hides all the URLs in it, adding tracking<br>
details, making them useless for sharing as well as adding a security<br>
hole that just doesn't need to be there ;the older "UTM" convention for<br>
link-tracking kept the readability of URLs and didn't funnel all<br>
requests through a trampoline, but--oh no--someone might remove the<br>
parameters and deflate the statistics by some miniscule amount!<br>
<br>
I used to reply to most of these, and even engaged what a couple of<br>
companies in what seemed like promising conversations as to how they're<br>
setting themselves up for tragedy if that single-point-of-failure ever<br>
gets compromised (or even just if it gets a malicious link injected).<br>
It's happened before--even to Google.<br>
<br>
The conversations all died out. Now my complaints aren't even heard<br>
anymore.<br>
<br>
The web normalized rude interactions between individuals and between<br>
developers and visitors. If any of us walked into a shop only to have<br>
some clerk cover our eyes and prevent us from walking further before<br>
giving contact details, we'd gut-punch the jerk and storm out. Yet,<br>
this is the normal sort of interaction between a visitor and most blogs,<br>
most medium-scale commercial sites, and even a few large ones.<br>
<br>
Now they're bringing that lack of tact to my mailbox, just as the<br>
spammers and joe-jobbers before them.<br>
<br>
I have no solutions, no noble action to improve things. Just needed to<br>
whine a bit. I can't feel like we (the geeks) built this thing, invited<br>
the rest of the world into "our house," and then got shoved out the back<br>
door so that we can watch them wreck the place.<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Jonathan Patschke<br>
Austin, TX<br>
USA<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
GEEKS: <a href="http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks_sunhelp.org" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks_sunhelp.org</a><br>
</blockquote></div>