Sort of. They can't change plain text, but modern emails often include vast swaths of remote content. When you open the message, it retrieves the relevant assets directly from whoever sent the email. That remote content is not permanently stored. It's cached for a bit and will not be re-used if the email is opened months or years later.
If those assets disappear or are changed, there's very little any email provider can do about that.
The benefit of this is senders couldn't treat it as a read receipt, because the provider can state "Our infra performs this operation for the user for immutability purposes" similar to other email operations that proxy these requests for privacy purposes.
And on the one hand, it's cool as hell to see your email update itself to show tracking progress
On the other hand, just send me a new email. It's fine, I promise.
Apple’s private loading feature also shows how that could be fixed: the mail server can retrieve the referenced content once and save it so you’d always know what was served at the time the message was sent.
It could be anywhere, which is another knock against HTML email.
Which is why text only email is still king, and used in a lot of places still.
But proving to others that an email hasn't been modified is a more difficult task. As I understand it, you'd need to retain DKIM keys for the signing server, to check that historical DKIM signatures verify correctly and the old message was not forged or altered.
Are DKIM signing keys issued in some kind of Certificate Transparency log, where you can verify whether a particular DKIM key existed for a particular domain in the past, in order to do this in general?
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim#but-gmails-...
EDIT: this one exists but is incomplete: https://archive.prove.email/about
I gotta be honest, this scenario is not a concern that impacts my choice of email provider.
But as in all cases, you can only be truly sure no one is tampering if you don't give it to anyone else.
The cameras used to document "news" will need to be watermarked, fingerprinted and authenticated, like what Canon and Nikon are already doing (and which AFP has already adopted).
It may have seemed gimmicky at first, but in a year or two, you'll probably only be able to trust visuals from companies that do this (wire agencies like AFP, AP and Reuters are heavily disincentivised to create fake news anyway but that's another topic).
At a certain level, I imagine social media apps will also encourage direct camera-to-post for documentation/videos of reality, since this will be the only end-to-end method to verify an image was created unaltered. I can imagine a world where, if you film a protest through the Instagram app, you'd get some kind of "this is real" badge on it, whereas if you upload a video, it gets treated as "could be AI" like 99% of all future content.
blibble•1h ago
fastmail: read my lips: I pay you because you offer a traditional email service
if you add a single AI feature I will return to self hosting
toomuchtodo•58m ago
mbesto•57m ago
barbazoo•27m ago
> Add a user to your billing plan to give someone their own Fastmail Inbox and login. Build your team, be it work or family, and share calendars, contacts and more. Give users extra addresses for free
The way my UX works is I can add users but they always have to have their own paid plan. Makes sense for heavy email users but not so much for my partner or our kids. I was hoping there was a 5 accounts for the price of 3 thing like Spotify et al do.
spott•24m ago
withinboredom•55m ago
gdulli•37m ago
jimbo808•20m ago
daveguy•50m ago
28304283409234•44m ago
dlcarrier•14m ago