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Comment by grepular | Hacker News Reader

> No, I'm not joking. We do have this option, and it's consistent with the defaults across private mail providers. Still waiting for your list of the ones that don't load images by default.

If you read back, you'll see I wrote email clients and providers. But I'll note that you have not provided a list of clients or providers with privacy defaults that are worse than yours.

> It does not load the images. That's just patently false disinfo.

It absolutely does. You have no idea how your own product works. I literally showed you a tool where you (or anyone else) can verify this yourself in a few minutes: https://www.emailprivacytester.com - By the way, I am the author of this tool, and your email product is the least privacy preserving email product on the market right now.

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I just compared Skiff and Tutanota on your tool. The results were the same. Thank you for confirming this.

I just tested Tutanota and it does not have the same bug that skiff has. I think you must be having trouble understanding what the bug is. In skiff, even if you choose to not load remote images, when you view an email that has remote images, although it doesn't show the images, it does fetch them. I look at my web server logs, and I can see it happen. Emailprivacytester.com also shows it happen. I have tested this several times now.

I do not know what your difficulty is. Perhaps you should pass this on to somebody more technical than yourself at your organisation who can actually understand and diagnose the problem.

Also. Since you used Tutanota as an example. From https://tutanota.com/security

> by default, does not load external content from other servers (pictures and videos in emails). The user can choose to have external content shown with a single click or tap, if they trust the sender.

So there you go. An email company that does not load images by default. Whereas the default setting for Skiff is to load images automatically. So in this respect, Tutanota puts "privacy first" and Skiff doesn't.

I take it by your lack of response that you're just going to ignore this bug report and leave your users exposed to the privacy issue.

Here's a Youtube video I created of it happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P30Qi2MSbUQ

I'll be blogging this up unless it's acknowledged and fixed.

I assume that once you've fixed the bug you'll be contacting all of your users to let them know that they've been exposed to this privacy flaw. At least the ones that may have disabled remote content at some point.

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