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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Many startups (e.g. Slack) aim to replace email, but this is backward. Email is open, standardized, and has been around for decades. The main challenge of the current information environment is multiple independent queues of items that ask for our attention: email, texts, chats, app alerts, social messages, social feeds. This would be much easier to manage in a single location, and email is the location where users have the most control. The control the user has with email is exactly the reason so many companies are trying to replace it.

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The thing I hate the most about email is that they allow loading images as a third party resource, instead of requiring them to be sent with the rest of the message data. This allows companies and spammers to track when you open an email.

(They also track every link you click on, but that's a separate issue.)

That's why some clients won't load images by default, only by request

I was disappointed to see the Gmail app on the Pixel actually automatically loads images for emails in the spam folder, with no way to turn them off except to turn off image loading across the board.

Gmail already proxies images in emails to their own servers.

But they still only request them when the client views them and not beforehand, so the view tracking still works and even has the proper timestamp for that.

That still tells the spammer you opened the email. I also doubt they do so for third party email accounts, which can also be used in the gmail app.

I mean, don't open the messages in the spam folder?

Suprisingly legit emails sometimes still go to spam. I recently had an actual message from Google go into spam and I didn't put it there.

I don't know if I've used a client that doesn't let you turn this off.

The problem is that most clients are configured to allow it. So people send email that loads external resources. Now you need a degraded experience for privacy.

If most clients disabled remote resources then senders would include them in the message.

Well, you do not have to allow images.

I pretty much don't.

Now and then I may allow one, depending.

Doesn't Gmail still proxy images so that this kind of tracking doesn't work? Or do they have a way around this?

They do, but they still load images on-demand the first time you open an email.

So a spammer will know if and when you opened email; but they would not know your IP or user agent.

The former is usually the most important part, and it is not blocked at all.

Yeah that's a shame. I guess it would be too expensive for Google to load the images of every single email though it would kinda avoid this issue. But I can see why that isn't really a feasible option.

It's also avoidable by just setting your email client to not load images by default. Not sure if gmail offers this, but I think it does.

Yeah haven't check if it's an option in Gmail but I am sure it is. Emails that get sent to spam however will not show images by default.

General settings : "Ask before displaying external images"

> I guess it would be too expensive for Google to load the images of every single email though it would kinda avoid this issue

Would it really? I have no idea what the dollar cost of that would be. I can see not wanting to pay for a feature most people wouldn't use, but I certainly think Google could afford it.

The biggest question would be what percent of pictures are loaded now and at what cost?

I know I get a lot of emails that I don't open all the time but still occasionally open. I am sure there are a lot of people in a similar boat. It's definitely a bit of a hard problem. I can see it being worth it for Google to implement into business accounts Gmail's, but not as economical for doing it on personal accounts.

they could preload them only for people who have the "never show images by default" setting turned on

Apparently they can't track IP and Device info but still can track when and how many times someone open.

Last info found googling was from 2013 though: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...

Images can be base64 encoded into emails

They can be, but they aren't required to be. An email that contains all the resources to display itself doesn't leak user information. An email that contains a 1x1 tracking pixel, loaded when the receiver opens the email, lets the sender know that it has been received. In view of email spam, this is an unacceptable breach of privacy.

Configure your client to never load any external links unless you specifically select one for viewing.

> This allows companies and spammers to track when you open an email.

"Email" doesn't allow that. If your email client does, that's a flaw in the client but clients are replaceable.

I use mutt and no links are ever followed.

The "clients" are de-facto Gmail and Outlook. Those two aren't going away anytime soon.

well, good news! GMail proxies that img link. Also, Outlook by default doesn't load external images.

Others in this thread have mentioned the proxying happens right when you open the email, so doesn't really protect you.

Only if you define them as such. I am quite happy with Thunderbird, which also allows me to read my RSS feeds.

They're not going away but you can pick something else, unlike with any proprietary system where the client is not a choice.

For security it’s recommended to use plain text email only. Inlined images are nice, but most everything else in html mail is unneeded. Email is the number one threat vector for companies.

Slack is great for quick messages. The error is to use one system for ephermal, immediate messages and not use another different one for longer message of less immediate nature. Email is great for the second. I have to have a folder of markdown files where I can draft messages to then post on slack, just because slacks own message editor can't be relied on not to post half my message.

Of course slack also can't handle markdown so my messages end up looking weird, but better weird than unreadable.

The upshot is that my messages end up impressing people because they are not just a garble of words, but have such features as headlines, paragraphs, lists and have been run through an actual spell checker.

> Many startups (e.g. Slack) aim to replace email

Whether or not this is an 'aim', chat (slack, texts) is a distinctly different medium than email, in the same way voice chat is.

Voice is synchronous, real-time communication. It's very immediate, but demands 100% attention while taking place.

Email is asynchronous, with an inherent delay from the slow workflow and turn-around time. It takes at least a few distinct actions to read and send a reply, and there's no indication if the person received your message or is replying (unless you're a sociopath that uses read receipts, anyway). You can of course reply quickly back and forth and get close to a synchronous medium, but it's at best awkward and just really doesn't work well for this.

Chat lives in the middle ground where it is kind of both: though it's really async, most platforms have an indicator of online/offline, typing, etc, and the friction to reply is very small, so it works well synchronous.

More importantly, in my mind, is the expectations that come with the medium.

Chat is casual, ephemeral, and has no expectation of response. After some minutes/hours/days (depending on context) a message goes stale and that's just how it is. It's also perfectly fine to reply "sorry, in a meeting until 2" or "not sure, maybe ask @otherperson?".

Email is more formal, long-lived has an expectation of a useful response. This turns your inbox into a todo list where all the items are added by other people as they see fit. The types of deferrals you can do in chat don't really work in email.

There's definitely disagreement on these, and that can cause a lot of friction between people that treat them differently (for example: people that use email as if it's chat drive me absolutely crazy -- let's just chat and finish this conversation in 1/2 the time, or have a voice call and finish it 1/10th the time!).

The BEST thing about slack is (was?) that nobody outside of your organization can message you.

Just create a whitelist in email if that’s what you want.

That doesn't work all that well in practice. I can probably trick your mail server into accepting spoofed mail. DKIM and SPF adoption being what it is.

How many times such mail actually comes?

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