Howdy everyone, I’m working on the problem of email services/readers (Gmail) visiting links within the message to do whatever they do when they do that (scan the content for bad things, mostly - but also useful things like previewing the page in a popup). Link prefetching itself isn’t really a terrible thing, but it leads to perhaps bad side effects when it comes to links in email messages that do things, like subscribe or remove someone from a mailing list.

Dada Mail has some protection for this, most specifically for its removal mechanism, but this leads a lot of other links vulnerable to this issue. For example: subscription request accepting/rejecting, moderation links, profile password resets, list password reset - and a few others. Here’s some discussion of the problem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240279

Here’s the branch I’ll be working on these modifications:

https://github.com/justingit/dada-mail/tree/features-POST_requests

The good news is, it’s not a huge deal to make the modifications, and shouldn’t break any links in the wild, so there’s little risk for you to upgrade. I did want attention of this issue to be raised, as it’ll be a useful upgrade to perform.

I guess a big question is, just how far do I take this? Should links in mass email messages that are tracked be protected by link prefetching? The advantage to protecting links is that false-clickthroughs will be essentially eliminated (if they happen by a link prefetcher). Negatives is that it’ll take an extra second for the link to go to where it’s supposed to go. I guess I could make this an option to begin with.

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Justin J: Lead Dadaist url: dadamailproject.com email: justin@PROTECTED twitter: @dadamail

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