Re: Message Link Prefetching Issue

 
From: "Bruce Scherzinger webmaster@PROTECTED [Dada Mail Developers]" <dadadev@PROTECTED>
In-Reply-To: (no subject)
Date: August 24th 2021
Hi Justin!

Always nice to hear from you and seeing you take care great of your baby. Hope you are doing well out there in the West. Nothing else. Just hi. 😃

Cheers,
Bruce Scherzinger

On August 24, 2021 5:18:17 PM "Justin John justin@PROTECTED [Dada Mail Developers]" <dadadev@PROTECTED> wrote:

 

From: justin@PROTECTED

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.

--

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

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