Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 6th Dec 2007 16:27 UTC
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
As it should from a handholding security point of view.
No nasty links you can click on might save your day. As in not being phished.
No nasty links you can click on might save your day. As in not being phished.
I think that may be going a bit too far - personally at least, I find quite a bit of utility to links in EMail (even when the messages themselves are displayed as text, but URLs are rendered as links). It would probably cost me at least an extra half an hour every work day with copy-pasting.
I guess an argument could be made for disabling that feature as the default - but I've found similar "security features" in Microsoft Products (E.g., attachment blocking) to be more hassle than they're worth. I can't count the number of times I've walked people through disabling attachment blocking over the phone - just so they could access legit/desired attachments. Although that does seem to be par-for-the-course with the new Microsoft security philosophy of "escaped horse, meet iron-clad, barred, and triple-locked barn door."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
There are several reasons:
- the number of EMail users who can't view HTML EMail is actually increasing (thanks to the rise in EMail-capable handheld devices).
- it's unnecessarily wasteful of bandwidth, especially since most mail clients send two versions of the same message (plain-text and HTML) to accommodate clients that can't view HTML.
- most of the capabilities of HTML that *would* be useful in EMail have been disabled because of their potential for abuse (want to send out a web-based form by EMail? Too bad, since it won't work with the latest versions of Outlook).
- spammers often use uniquely-named images in EMails for address validation (if there's any traffic to the image, then they know the address is valid) - so newer EMail clients don't load images automatically.
- and on a more subjective level, it enables annoying crap like "IncrediMail" (if you've ever received an EMail with auto-playing background audio or animations in the signature, you know what I mean).
I'm not one of those "purists" who believe that all EMail should be plain-text and nothing else - I just wish that there was some standard for text formatting in EMail that wasn't quite so heavyweight compared to plain text (the size of a message shouldn't quadruple simply because a word has been italicized).