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RFC: notes as email
15 years ago
I hate notes. Hate 'em. They're just a cheap copy of email, except they're less functional, they all work a little differently, I have to go to X Y Z etc sites to check them, and they only work within that one site. I already have a way for people to send me not-immediate messages; why not use it?
So I propose the following and am curious what people think:
I want to send a "note" to purplekecleon. On her userpage or wherever is a link to do this.
The link is actually just a mailto:, with a recipient of purplekecleon[at]floof.com (or whatever). I don't have to know what her email address is.
I bang out some emotionally inspiring message in my email client.
to: purplekecleon[at]floof.com
subject: dicks
please draw dicks
heres 20
attachment: $20.jpg
Right. Off it goes.
PK then receives an email that is marked as being from eevee@floof.com, but to her regular email address. She doesn't have to know my email, either.
She can then reply, or star it, or label it, or do whatever zillion things her email client does. At no point is either of our emails exposed publicly, and it's obvious that the emails are coming from a specific user of a particular site.
Thoughts?
Some things to keep in mind:
- Email does support read receipts.
- In theory, only email from known email addresses would actually be passed on by the server like this. I'm not quite sure how this would actually work at the moment, but the idea is that it still works functionally like notes: only user-to-user communication.
The lesser version of this is to allow people explicitly ask to receive their notes as email, but then they'd still have to use the site to reply, and that's a bit self-defeating.
So I propose the following and am curious what people think:
I want to send a "note" to purplekecleon. On her userpage or wherever is a link to do this.
The link is actually just a mailto:, with a recipient of purplekecleon[at]floof.com (or whatever). I don't have to know what her email address is.
I bang out some emotionally inspiring message in my email client.
to: purplekecleon[at]floof.com
subject: dicks
please draw dicks
heres 20
attachment: $20.jpg
Right. Off it goes.
PK then receives an email that is marked as being from eevee@floof.com, but to her regular email address. She doesn't have to know my email, either.
She can then reply, or star it, or label it, or do whatever zillion things her email client does. At no point is either of our emails exposed publicly, and it's obvious that the emails are coming from a specific user of a particular site.
Thoughts?
Some things to keep in mind:
- Email does support read receipts.
- In theory, only email from known email addresses would actually be passed on by the server like this. I'm not quite sure how this would actually work at the moment, but the idea is that it still works functionally like notes: only user-to-user communication.
The lesser version of this is to allow people explicitly ask to receive their notes as email, but then they'd still have to use the site to reply, and that's a bit self-defeating.
Though I agree that the notes and the PMs thing generally is a bit of a sub-optimal pain.
- sender and recipient don't have to know each other's email addresses (which people are slightly touchy about)
- it's quite obvious who the person is and where they came from (which sort of sucks about email, especially for people with ancient addresses of nameidontuseanymore@yahoo.com)
I don't mean to put a dampener on it, though, because putting them all together like you're suggesting actually does seem like an interesting and probably useful idea. I'd like to see it tried somewhere.
Is it even possible to trust who the sender claims to be at all? That's a bit of a roadblock here. It wouldn't be too much of a practical issue, as fake spam From headers are unlikely to be real users' email addresses, but it's still a potential avenue of attack.
it is very