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by Piskvorrr 5172 days ago
Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C. Voila plaintext (or in your case, a readable screenshot of the plaintext - I've been experimenting with the site meanwhile), let me forward that.

Moreover, I very much prefer my e-mail textual - some of my e-mail devices may be severely constrained in bandwidth and screen size; text compresses, transmits and scales way better (also: insert standard accessibility rant here).

Also, what of nomadic users? "Oh, your smartphone already accessed the one copy [for added fun, try "and didn't save it"]? No way to read the e-mail anywhere else, tough luck."

You have addressed the above as caveats - however, there one more thing that bothers me, immensely - the immediate, silent and complete retraction capability: "I never said that" is bad enough, "I never sent you an e-mail like that" would be worse. For dealing with certain people, I like to have a local copy of what was written, just in case they change their mind later. Even if I kept local copies of the screenshots, I like my evidence searchable, too - eyeballing a bunch of images to find a specific e-mail is distinctly suboptimal.

On the other hand, if you are facing the one exact problem of people mindlessly forwarding your e-mail, verbatim, this might be a useful mitigation technique. It's a nice project, but not useful for me - it would solve problems I don't have, while saddling me with other problems I don't want to have.

As for "no real website design" - I actually like the clean and minimal design :)

1 comments

If you read the site, they convert it to an image. Usability for this sucks, no searching, no copying.
Nothing can stop someone simply saving the image and sending it as regular email. If it can be read, it can be copied. No point pretending otherwise.

[Edit: fix stray question mark.]

Well, you could pursue legal action under the DMCA for those sorts of actions in principle, but other than that, there is no need for a question mark on your first statement.

It is, if you like, the exact problem that copyright enforcement and digital rights management (DRM) have. No matter what you do, if you send me a threat and I really want to forward that to the police department, I can always hit "Print Screen." Simply showing X to me enables me to copy X. If you let me play music out of my headphones, I can always in principle connect my headphone jack to a computer's microphone input and get a lossy-but-acceptable DRM-free copy, because my headphone jack does not implement DRM. (In the early DRMed days of iTunes we used to do this with burning music to CDs, which iTunes allowed.

Just allowing a kid to enter the movie theater allows him to smuggle in a camera and post the video on BitTorrent. Just seeing is always sufficient for lossy copying, if only because we keep a lossy copy in our memories. (I've discussed this elsewhere but I'd prefer not to linkspam myself.)