... Because it is basically the same concept but worse because you just gave up the privacy of your inbox to be data mined and sold. All for some minor conveniences masquerading as a "cool hack".
I don't think that's cool at all.
My father's a B2B salesman who spends a lot of time using LinkedIn for lead acquisition. He's thrilled for this thing because he spends "way too much time fiddling with the iPhone browser to try and get this info."
I'm not saying the underlying security issues aren't valid, but to say it's a "minor convenience" is a failure of perspective.
I don't get why people say it shouldn't be made... it should be made, but they should educate the users as to all of the trade-offs needed.
As it stands, I think people are going to be weirded out (as we are) about LinkedIn reading your email. The regular user doesn't love them that much, I'd think, so I think it's likely Intro will fail.
Also, I saw some different results as to where the content is injected. In some cases, it was right in the middle of my content - which seemed weird. Obviously, if they aren't consistently making sure their's has the last say, then it becomes easy to override their settings.
Of course - my CSS skills are awful, so someone please feel free to correct me on that.
It'll probably take them a while to catch everything. They could easily kill any CSS that's hitting the #rapportive ID with regex, or by making the ID a unique random string on each email. I believe placing all the original content in a "position:relative; overflow: hidden;" would fix your overlay concerns. Definitely an annoying cat-and-mouse game, but since they're ultimately writing the email that ends up in your inbox, they should be able to consistently prevent this kind of attack.
If things were true, spam would have died out by now. Admittedly, companies like Gmail do a good job of controlling but sufficiently large volumes of spam get through to the point where it's being opened and clicked where spammers still consider this a viable business.
So not, it's not a cat-and-mouse game where the owner wins. A sufficiently determined attacker will still get in. If your thesis were true, we would have built an unhackable computer by now.
Without access to the HTML, you have the chance to get ridiculously specific, eg:
* html body div#rapportive...