I’ve practically given up on clicking any sort of links from marketing emails as they are full of multiple redirect trackers. Which, is a shame, as these are obviously from companies I care to keep up with and support.

Email will always have its place, but I agree the default email experience we all know shouldn’t default to essentially a viewport.

I'm not sure how this is better though. With chat clients you are completely locked into their ecosystem. Email at least is an open protocol and interoperable.

Maybe in your bubble, but globally this is just false.

I don't see how this follows. Yes, HTML email fucking sucks. But most people are using Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc, all of which do a pretty good job at handling HTML emails - especially between each other. How do you go from "html emails are bad" to "html emails led to IM replacing email"?

I feel like the major problem with almost everything that has a feed these days is the feed. Real state is a finite resource victim of the tragedy of commons: to be visible, you must post, but if others post, you are less visible, so to be even more visible, you post more, which prompts others to post even more, and anyone who doesn't play this game loses.

This happens with all feeds: chronological feeds on Tumblr, e-mail, RSS, etc.

One project I've seen that has tried a novel approach to this was https://fraidyc.at/ Essentially instead of putting all posts in a line, it's an RSS client that just tells you who has posted recently but not what they have posted.

HTML is going to be inseparable part of e-mail for as long as e-mail lives, and yeah, it seems more likely than e-mail will die as a whole rather than get any simpler technically.

At this point we can only get better at filtering the HTML.

Edit: one marketing site describes a new category of Apple Opens (vs. Human Opens), so sounds like the feature’s effective

But you can read gmail in thunderbird or any other email client, and in that case gmail still doesn't know anything more than that your client performed a sync, which it might be doing periodically at all times and so isn't meaningful.

(Seems reasonable to link to the bug report or something, but this is not my domain.)

1. It's not a minor issue that a privacy feature doesn't work.

2. OP clearly stated ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/3095#note_... ) that they know the fixes are not trivial, so at the very least they want the application and website to make it clear that the privacy feature doesn't work, so that users are not misled.

Handwaving this away because "nobody will do this" is in the same family of issues as "I have nothing to hide" or "what can they really do with my data?"

> you can't expect people to fix everything, especially for fairly minor issues like this.

The feature is called "Load Remote Content". Turning that off should have predictable consequences. The fact that it doesn't do what people would rightly assume it should do is not a "fairly minor issue".

People who blindly accept problems, who accept a lack of concern about privacy, both as a right and as a preference, who handwave away poor behavior aren't helping anyone. Tech companies rarely DTRT on their own, so people need to hold their feet to the fire. Those companies don't need apologists.