Every wondered how Facebook spoofs Gmail message list snippet text?

87•chrisjj•4d ago

E.g. Gmail inbox shows a message contains "XXX tagged you on Facebook. Take a look about what she said on you."

But when you open the message, there's no "Take a look about what she said on you."

Answer. The text is present but hidden:

<span style=3D"color:#FFFFFF;font-size:1px;opacity:0;">Take a look at what she said about you.</span>

And unsurprisingly whenever I do click through, I find she hasn't said anything about me.

Comments

lysace•4d ago

HTML email was a mistake. I believe the guilty party is Microsoft with Outlook 97.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-outlook/97

scarface_74•3d ago

I think Apple is the guilty party of starting it first with OpenDoc based CyberDog released in 1996.

kyralis•2d ago

Can we really blame OpenDoc for anything, though? It seems more sad than impactful, honestly.

robocat•2d ago

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

Interesting because everybody was competing: but competing for a concept that is now largely obsolete because it failed?

Some modern competition (e.g. AI) has a similar feel.

sokoloff•2d ago

OpenDoc did at least provide part of the question’s premise for one of my favorite Steve Jobs answers:

https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=1n-rkSke_ezLcidn

scarface_74•2d ago

I was on Usenet at the time and Apple also had a newsreader. There were post from Mac users with Mime encoded messages that everyone else hated.

superjan•2d ago

In my recollection it was Netscape, this appers to confirm it:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...

weinzierl•2d ago

From my recollection Microsoft pushed their own RTF like rich mail format hard for a while and did support HTML only reluctantly.

account42•2d ago

They still support HTML only reluctantly.

donnachangstein•2d ago

Thanks for linking to a picture of testicles.

stickfigure•2d ago

That particular blog author displays special content if the referrer is HN. It's embarrassingly juvenile for someone that must be in their 50s by now.

opello•2d ago

Having had that a few times, and recently relaxing Firefox's referer policy for some other site compatibility which had avoided it before, I came to this workaround with uBlock Origin:

    jwz.org##^responseheader(set-cookie)
    jwz.org##^responseheader(location)

Hopefully documenting it doesn't perpetuate the arms race.

superjan•2d ago

Oh sorry, I did not know that was the guy who hates being linked to from HN. Copy the link manually to read it if you still care to learn what he wrote.

zzo38computer•2d ago

I use a email client without HTML email. I have not had problems with this.

ninjin•2d ago

You are not the only one and whenever there is no text/plain there is webdump:

https://codemadness.org/git/webdump/file/README.html

pwdisswordfishz•2d ago

Well, HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake. This could have been avoided by a profile of HTML that removes presentation markup and CSS, leaving only pure semantic markup that a client can render in a "reader mode" equivalent.

lproven•2d ago

> HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake.

No, I agree with the original comment.

Formatting is bad for accessibility, bad for spoofing and spamming, bad for quoting and highlighting, and more besides.

It is bad in general. Always was.

https://useplaintext.email/

diggan•2d ago

Well, except for the case when you want a unique-looking email, with your own style, then plaintext kind of sucks :)

Sure, we could argue that people shouldn't want that, but then reality tends to be somewhat annoying like that.

lproven•2d ago

And yet, we all coped with SMS.

Despite this terrible burden on people's SpArkLiNg 0rIg1n4l cReAtIviTy we send TRILLIONS a year.

https://www.intradyn.com/text-message-statistics-trends/

It's not so bad. You can live with it. Being CREATIVE and expressing your personality damages the medium and impairs conveying your message. So: don't.

diggan•2d ago

> And yet, we all coped with SMS.

We literally didn't, otherwise MMS wouldn't have been as popular as it was :)

Personally I too prefer plaintext in almost every case. But I also understand why people don't share that preference.

lproven•2d ago

In my world, MMS never was popular. Where do you live?

diggan•1d ago

Live in Spain, but grew up in Sweden, am around 30 years old. In late 90s/early 2000s, MMS was wildly popular among my peers.

lproven•17h ago

Huh. OK, then. Interesting datapoint. It was a PITA flop in the UK -- it occasionally kicked in when an SMS went over length or you added a smiley, and cost you 10x as much to send.

k4rli•2d ago

Some sites don't even bother anymore and just send the contents as a multi-MB image. Sort of "pdf as email" to not bother checking if the template works for all sorts of mail clients.

macguillicuddy•2d ago

I wonder if, in the pipe dream that email were magically replaced by something more modern, we'd use something like markdown instead.

chrisjj•2d ago

How would that help here?

sureIy•2d ago

HTML was a mistake.

What if browsers just returned texts with links and auto-linked and auto-embedded them like markdown does? Only on request. A true user agent.

Well, I would have settled for HTML 1 for the forms.

slater•4d ago

She did say something about you, but she wrote it in white text

mometsi•2d ago

  .happiness {  
    color: #FFF;
    background-color: #FFF;
  }

chrisjj•2d ago

:) But no.

mcintyre1994•2d ago

A bunch of places do this! Audible does “top picks for you”, LinkedIn does “recommended actions for you”

I remember at an old company downloading email templates and loads of them would have some kind of preview text field that used this trick.

JimDabell•2d ago

In several mail clients, for multipart emails, the snippet is taken from the plaintext part while the email is rendered from the HTML part. So if you see something in the snippet that you don’t see when you read the email, then it’s possible it’s only in the plaintext part.

chrisjj•2d ago

This text is absent from this message's plain text part.

nokun7•2d ago

I have seen Nextdoor also do the same and I had alway wondered. I believe it uses the same mechanism. Quite interesting.

tomnipotent•2d ago

This is called preview text/preview header and is even supported by email service providers like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. It's been common practice for going on fifteen years.

gwd•2d ago

I was going to say, when you send bulk mail with Brevo, they explicitly prompt you for what the "preview text" should look like, and show how it might look on an iPhone Mail or desktop Gmail.

BLKNSLVR•2d ago

Email version of clickbait headlines. It's fucking gross, but it will never go away because it works. Fuck 'em all.

How long until humans are entirely farm-able? Are we close enough already?

sneak•2d ago

Obvious, but worth repeating: it goes away when you delete your facebook account. Stop using gmail.

You cannot control others. You _can_ control yourself.

Don’t be the honey in the trap of big tech surveillance platforms. Being on these platforms legitimizes and encourages their use for your friends and family.

Delete your facebook and instagram. Sell or trash your oculus. Buy a domain and email hosting and migrate off your gmail.

sureIy•2d ago

Unfortunately some people want to have some semblance of social life and in some circles dropping Instagram means decimating your pool.

sneak•2d ago

This doesn’t get better by ignoring the problem.

This is the social equivalent of just throwing your hands up and saying “it can’t be helped”.

I cannot stress this enough: it _is not_ true. Deleting your IG will not cause your friends to stop being your friends.

Being on these platforms legitimizes their use. It makes the situation _worse_. It is a vote for surveillance and censorship of your most intimate personal connections.

aleph_minus_one•2d ago

> in some circles dropping Instagram means decimating your pool

Rather: dropping Instagram means improving the (average) quality of the people in your pool. :-)

sureIy•2d ago

Not if you're under 25

aleph_minus_one•15h ago

Even then (or even particularly then). In this age, some persons rather have very "twisted" measures of quality for other people.

djaychela•2d ago

But that definitely isn't everyone and the more people who reject your normalisation of this, the less strength there will be to it. And social life certainly doesn't look like Instagram statistics monitoring to me.

robertlagrant•2d ago

That's a conflicting requirement. You can't want to be free of drugs and also keep doing heroin because all your friends do it.

HenryBemis•2d ago

Facebook could implement the feature that could tell you which of your friends is within walking distance, so you can grab a coffee, but nope. Also facebook = cancer, and unfortunately now we have more cancers (TikTok, etc.)

sureIy•2d ago

They actually did at some point, but people hate that. https://howfinity.com/how-to-use-facebook-nearby-friends/

aleph_minus_one•2d ago

There is a simple solution: delete your Facebook account completely. Problem solved.

cj•2d ago

No need to delete your account to escape facebook.

Simply turn off notifications. And "pull" entertainment from it if you want, don't let it push content to you.

I find myself going weeks without opening facebook. I still enjoy the occasional doom scroll, but it feels better when I know I'm doing it and not accidentally getting sucked in.

aleph_minus_one•2d ago

> No need to delete your account to escape facebook.

Perhaps. But deleting your Facebook account makes solving the problem of escaping Facebook so much easier.

eimrine•2d ago

If you will mark as spam those messages, Gmail will return them after few months.

Hamuko•2d ago

I feel like I've had pretty good experience with mark as spam working. But I try to first do a regular unsubscribe from messages and really only resort to marking as spam when unsubscribing doesn't work or has been made intentionally difficult (like requiring login).

eimrine•1d ago

I want those subscriptions be active but only inside the borders of FB. I do not want to unsubscribe from everything just because I visit FB once a year or less. Those guys are my friends or schoolmates. But if FB provided that kind of instrument which unsubscribes from everything at once, I would do this just for the sake of being nice to Facebook, I understand that these annoying messages are not exactly a spam. For example, I never use their private message features, so I really do not need those 17 emails per day.

nilirl•2d ago

This is not a spoof?

Previews are an optional protocol that email clients have followed for a while now.

See: https://react.email/docs/components/preview

iamacyborg•2d ago

Referring to them as a protocol is misunderstanding how these things are created, imo.

It’s not unlikely that inbox providers will just use AI to generate these based on the email content in the near future.

nilirl•2d ago

You're right. It is not a protocol.

Each client implements previews differently and they don't specify how.

chrisjj•2d ago

> Email clients have this concept of “preview text” which gives insight into what’s inside the email before you open.

This isn't previewing what's inside the email.

axegon_•2d ago

Disclosure: I do not have a facebook account and I am not a lawyer. But... I am pretty sure that's in breach of several EU regulations if this is happening to EU citizens and EU residents: DSA, GDPR, ePrivacy directive, consumer protection and possibly misleading advertising and unfair commercial practices.

iamacyborg•2d ago

Email preview text is very well documented at this point.

https://www.litmus.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-preview-te...

chrisjj•2d ago

This is not preview text.

iamacyborg•1d ago

What do you think preview text is?

chrisjj•1d ago

In this context, same as you cited.

"Preview text is the bit of text below or next to an email’s subject line in the inbox that gives extra insight into what’s inside the email."

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Every wondered how Facebook spoofs Gmail message list snippet text?

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