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I) Where's the utility of this tool?
> Right-click -> Save Image as -> forward to anybody you want
1) The purpose of this demo is just to establish if anyone finds this type of service useful. There are many ways to expand this technology so that it becomes far more complex to defeat.
2) Perhaps I've sent this information to many people, but I've automatically watermarked each image. Now I can track the information leak back to you and carry out some more traditional corrective procedures...
3) Maybe this product just isn't for you? Perhaps this product is best suited for companies and government organizations, where clear policies and penalties already provide effective deterrents. This service would just supplement these policy-instruments with additional automated protection, auditing and watermarking.
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II) Minor technical challenges:
> Most email readers block images by default
It's easy enough to turn images on, in the most widely-used clients. Just looking at my inbox, embedded images are far from uncommon in emails.
> Answering by quoting your email just got really hard.
Answering by quoting email works great, if you're alright with quoting everything. The SMTP integration supports full HTML emails and shows the quoted email very similarly to the way that Gmail does.
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III) Accessibility vs data protection tradeoffs. These are fine:
> Disabled persons who rely on screen readers and other assistance technologies just got screwed, thanks.
> Your email picture service is down or has server trouble, no recipient can read such mails anymore.
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IV) Solvable problems:
> I've read your email at the office, now I can't read it at home, or on my iPhone, or vice versa.
This is solveable. See my other comment.
> Searching trough email by text will never find those emails because they contain no text. Devices with small screen sizes (iPhone and the like) can't re-layout the text (as in word wrap), making such image emails really painful to read.
NOFWD keeps an archive of the messages you send through it (which you can choose to delete or disable if you wish.) You can search this.
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V) Are these really a problem?:
> Some email services download images for you and don't link to your server.
Really? I'd like to know which. Haven't seen this happen yet.
> Cryptographic email signing becomes meaningless as the recipient can't parse the signature and message body to verify the hash.
> A lot of spam filters might screen out emails that are nothing but an image.