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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is it really shouldn't be this hard to identify spoofed email addresses.

I feel like we've gone backwards in UX with Inbox app and mobile email clients that hide the email by default.

"Friendly" email headers are the new "hide known file extensions" :(

Why does it display the name of anyone not in your contacts? Seems trivial to abuse. Hi, I'm Barack Obama, and I'm looking for a donation to prevent terrorism and child porn.

You completely changed your comment, so I'm responding to the original text:

> I keep my file extensions hidden because if that's all between me and a virus I'm already fucked. It's also a sign I need to move operating systems.

Showing extensions doesn't just guard against viruses, it also allows you to know what file type a file is, without having to memorize every icon on your system. You can also rename files to a different extension if you need to.

i can't speak for other OSs but if you click on the file you can see the extension. It's really only a pain in the ass when I can't remember and write the extension twice.

Somehow you found the comment more interesting than I.

You can also use your favorite terminal emulator, and stop worrying about icons, file extensions, and "clicking on the wrong one".

Except that on systems that have the concept of "file extension", those extensions are used to determine how to open a file by default. If you're using Linux you don't care either way, but on Windows, even if on a terminal emulator, you have to care anyway.

I don't know what to say other than The Windows brand was permanently damaged from the ability to install a virus by double clicking a .jpeg. For years. UAC should have arrived with NT.

Although the whole address can be faked anyways so it's not a huge loss.

That being said we are starting to create fairly good systems to prevent spoofed addresses.

Yup, and not only that, but Inbox got rid of the "Show Original" option! I used that all the time to see the real headers. Seems like twice a week I have to go to Gmail just to look at headers.

Inbox has "Show Original" for a few months now. It's under the three dots menu for messages (not threads).

Ooo, thanks!

this is one of my biggest gripes about the entire apple ecosystem. every app tries its hardest to hide emails from you, when that's the only thing a business person would care about.

At least Mail.app lets you whitelist certain domains, making recipients with other domains pop in red when you're composing. It's useful in a corporate setting.

As for sender, you can make it show the actual email address at all times (disable "use smart addresses").

On OS X/macOS, Mail.app by default has a default rule to highlight certain Apple-approved addresses as blue; however, this list is centered around marketing and promotional outboxes.

yeah i use all that, it still finds ways to hide the email from me.

also, the fact that it won't show an auto-complete list on a domain, is aggravating.

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