Could this not be solved by setting up a file that responds to the alt-text email with something like: reaction not received, send a real email cheers.
Thumbs up emoji can be considered as legal agreement (if you had previous agreements made same way), so it is no different than any other acknowledgment.
See case of farmer having to pay penalty for not delivering on agreement, agreed over a messaging platform with a thumbs up emoji.
If they didn't have thumbs up as an option, they'd almost certainly feel compelled to send an actual text to show agreement. Then you have to debate whether you need to send a text back to acknowledge their agreement. Thumbs up emojis are great! They mean: I'm happy for this conversation to finish now.
I got a hilarious email from an MS Exchange sender the other day which was attempting to "Recall" an email that the sender had just sent. Yeah, nope, that's not how Mutt + fetchmail works.
This seems like a convoluted way of adding a new header, at least compared to the http servers I know. Why is that? Maybe postfix is not the appropriate place to make this change and that’s why there’s no option to just add a new header?
This feels like something that should be opt-in, not opt-out. It feels trivial to have all clients that support it send a header stating they do, and it is ridiculous that the default is to allow sending reacts to clients that don't support them
It's a embrace-extend-extiguish play like the old days. Add a 'feature' that doesn't technically break the rules (or only does a little), get your users used to it (by making it the default, opt-out, etc) and hope that your users will pressure people not using your product to move. "What do you mean you didn't see my email reaction? That's the best feature in the whole world. You should really switch to outlook, etc.". See: every M$-only feature in IE.
Upvoted because that’s about the only way to get the message away.
But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).
I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.
We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.
With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.
Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.
Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.
By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.
So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.
I used to work with people who would reply, editing the subject line to end with something like " ACK. <eom>"
These "reaction" message seem about the same as that, and are no more or less annoying. If it became disruptive, I'd rather ask people to stop than fiddle with my server configuration to try to make it stop.
We use MS365 at work and colleagues “react” in Outlook with thumbs-up to my emails sometimes. Fine, I guess it is a lightweight way to signal support or agreement. Not too different from reactions in Teams or Slack.
BUT… there is a keyboard shortcut to do it, apparently, that is not too far from my typical typing pattern. Because sometimes I end up sending a thumbs-up reaction email when I did not mean to.
This is incredibly awkward when it goes to some random external partner or vendor. And especially when I’m in the process of drafting a serious reply. One time a vendor saw from me: thumbs-up email, thumbs-up email, serious email dinging them for messing something up. The first two were accidents and could not be stopped or recalled.
I asked our IT team and apparently there is no MS setting to prevent these email reactions from going external. Which is insane because the internal/external email boundary is so fundamental to the MS365 value prop and security model.
20 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] threadIt seems your colleagues do.
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978073 - July 2024 (354 comments)
(First world problems...)
See case of farmer having to pay penalty for not delivering on agreement, agreed over a messaging platform with a thumbs up emoji.
But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).
I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.
We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.
With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.
Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.
Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.
By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.
So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.
These "reaction" message seem about the same as that, and are no more or less annoying. If it became disruptive, I'd rather ask people to stop than fiddle with my server configuration to try to make it stop.
BUT… there is a keyboard shortcut to do it, apparently, that is not too far from my typical typing pattern. Because sometimes I end up sending a thumbs-up reaction email when I did not mean to.
This is incredibly awkward when it goes to some random external partner or vendor. And especially when I’m in the process of drafting a serious reply. One time a vendor saw from me: thumbs-up email, thumbs-up email, serious email dinging them for messing something up. The first two were accidents and could not be stopped or recalled.
I asked our IT team and apparently there is no MS setting to prevent these email reactions from going external. Which is insane because the internal/external email boundary is so fundamental to the MS365 value prop and security model.