[2019] Adding HTML Into Signatures

[Pen Dragon]

HTML in signatures is quite the norm of 2018-2019. This is a request to add HTML compatibility (and the message body) into the signature field.

(This is a request, I cannot code myself but I am learning JavaScript right now, I understand this is community-driven. Thanks for all you do maintainers and developers :) ).

[Pen Dragon]

Past (relevant) link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/k-9-mail/html$20signature|sort:date/k-9-mail/dKLo-peopmI/X40RL4_BCgAJ

[Andy Figueroa]

Just say no to such fluff.

> maintainers and developers)

[S]

That would be indeed a nice feature. It is a total bogus assumption that HTML mails are bad or can cause damage. As long as the feature is optional and only activated when needed, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Nobody is forced to use it.

[Greg Troxel]

S <pfohl.s...@gmail.com> writes:

> That would be indeed a nice feature. It is a total bogus assumption that
> HTML mails are bad or can cause damage. As long as the feature is optional
> and only activated when needed, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
> Nobody is forced to use it.

As long as I don't get any mails with html signatures unless I check the
"allow others to send me html signatures" box in k-9, then I can see
your point :-)

But seriously -- some of the html mail I get is ok. Most is infested
with trackers or fails to contain a text/plain with equivalent content.
The broad dislike of html mail has been earned.

[David W. Jones]

Here, here! Especially trackers. Also, attempts to trigger buffer
overflows in HTML rendering engines.

Not a fan of HTML emails here, either.

--
David W. Jones
gnome...@gmail.com
wandering the landscape of god
http://dancingtreefrog.com

[Pen Dragon]

I understand all of your concerns, but a great quantity of K9 users will be benefited from HTML signatures.

I myself want it, so I can automatically insert pictures as buttons (pictures with links, like with a small picture of a Facebook logo, that goes to my profile).

I like the idea of disabling incoming HTML, especially for certain contacts (e.g: newsletters).

[Uri Blumenthal]

There is some convenience in HTML emails and HTML signatures (though I consider them quite silly), but IMHO the risks and downsides heavily outweigh the benefits. To answer the statement, an even greater quantity of K-9 users would be victimized by HTML signatures.

I'm against this feature.

Sent from my test iPhone

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[S]

I didn't get it... I can understand people who have a concerns reading HTML mails. If a client is programmed wrong or sloppy, this can lead to problems, especially with trackers and the like. If the displaying client is set up correctly, displaying HTML mails is no problem either. Tracker, images, CSS, JavaScript, HTML buffer overflows and the like should be filtered out correctly. A certain residual risk remains, of course, but this also applies to pure text mails. That makes K9 actually quite good so far. HTML mails are displayed quite reasonably, without any great problems. If you don't want HTML at all, the display switches to plain text and such mails are shown as plain text (if they also have a text part).

But that's not the point here, because viewing is a completely different topic, it's more about creating HTML mails or mails with HTML signature. In principle therefore formatted mails. Here alone the client has the power to generate the mails in such a way that they have no harmful contents. It is not required to work with CSS effects or to create sophisticated layouts. It's rather about enabling simple formatting, like bold, italic, underline, enumerations, etc.

Am Donnerstag, 16. Mai 2019 13:28:15 UTC+2 schrieb Mouse:

There is some convenience in HTML emails and HTML signatures (though I consider them quite silly), but IMHO the risks and downsides heavily outweigh the benefits. To answer the statement, an even greater quantity of K-9 users would be victimized by HTML signatures.

I'm against this feature.

Sent from my test iPhone

> On May 16, 2019, at 04:39, Pen Dragon <kingti...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I understand all of your concerns, but a great quantity of K9 users will be benefited from HTML signatures.
>
> I myself want it, so I can automatically insert pictures as buttons (pictures with links, like with a small picture of a Facebook logo, that goes to my profile).
>
> I like the idea of disabling incoming HTML, especially for certain contacts (e.g: newsletters).
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "K-9 Mail" group.

> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to k-9-...@googlegroups.com.

[Pen Dragon]

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 7:07:42 AM UTC-5, S wrote:

It is not required to work with CSS effects or to create sophisticated layouts. It's rather about enabling simple formatting, like bold, italic, underline, enumerations, etc.

Yes! This is the point that we trying to convey. Thank you S for saying it simpler and elegantly than I had or would have.

It is the simple mechanics of bold, italic, inserting links into words or pictures that, little as it may seem, adds great functionality to signatures and the message body as well.

[David W. Jones]

>signatures and the *message body* as well.

Yes, adding images provides great functionality for tracking and other privacy invasions.

David W. Jones
gnome...@gmail.com
wandering the landscape of god
http://dancingtreefrog.com

Sent from my Android device with F/LOSS K-9 Mail.

[Pen Dragon]

On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:56:41 PM UTC-5, David W. Jones wrote:

Yes, adding images provides great functionality for tracking and other privacy invasions.

Yes, but I have a saying: "Ban plastic knifes from the school cafeteria? I do wish [insert school principle] would realize that I can kill someone with my car keys". The point of this saying is that anything can be used as a weapon. And in this case, if I wished to track someone I would simply replace all the links (e.g: facebook.com/Bob) with tracking links (e.g: https://bit.ly/2LP4mva <-- that is a tracking link).

I did not need HTML to add tracking links.
I do not need HTML to add pictures that will track you if you decided to view it

But we do need HTML to add italic, bold, or underlined.

[Uri Blumenthal]

Nobody in their right mind would click on a link in an email, especially insecure email. But pictures and such that the email app downloads automatically for you is a different story (of course, reasonable people configure their clients to never do that). 

If a person cannot create email without sticking a picture or weird fonts into his signature - ...

Sent from my test iPhone

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[Calum Mackay]

On 17/05/2019 12:44 am, Uri Blumenthal wrote:
> Nobody in their right mind would click on a link in an email, especially
> insecure email. But pictures and such that the email app downloads
> automatically for you is a different story (of course, reasonable people
> configure their clients to never do that).
>
> If a person cannot create email without sticking a picture or weird
> fonts into his signature - ...

Annoyingly, some companies have that as a requirement, i.e. to add a
custom HTML signature to emails that their employees send, via the
employee's mail app.

Telling the company that they shouldn't have that requirement, isn't the
answer in most cases, sadly.

regards,
calum.

>
> Sent from my test iPhone
>
> On May 16, 2019, at 19:10, Pen Dragon <kingti...@gmail.com

> <mailto:kingti...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 5:56:41 PM UTC-5, David W. Jones wrote:
>>
>> Yes, adding images provides great functionality for tracking and
>> other privacy invasions.
>>
>>
>> Yes, but I have a saying: "Ban plastic knifes from the school
>> cafeteria? I do wish [insert school principle] would realize that I
>> can kill someone with my car keys". The point of this saying is that
>> anything can be used as a weapon. And in this case, if I wished to
>> track someone I would simply replace all the links (e.g:

>> facebook.com/Bob <http://facebook.com/Bob>) with tracking links (e.g:

>> https://bit.ly/2LP4mva <-- that is a tracking link).
>>
>> I did not need HTML to add tracking links.
>> I do not need HTML to add pictures that will track you if you decided
>> to view it
>>
>> But we do need HTML to add italic, bold, or underlined.
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>> Groups "K-9 Mail" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
>> an email to k-9-mail+u...@googlegroups.com

>> <mailto:k-9-mail+u...@googlegroups.com>.

>> To view this discussion on the web visit
>> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/k-9-mail/fdeb6de9-f07e-4a38-849b-fd4d66788b69%40googlegroups.com

>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/k-9-mail/fdeb6de9-f07e-4a38-849b-fd4d66788b69%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.

>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

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[Uri Blumenthal]

Yes, that's a shame.

Of course, our firewall would block those emails unless explicitly instructed not to...

One could tell such a company that serious organizations won't receive their emails...

Sent from my test iPhone

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[Gunter Königsmann]

Same at my working place: you write a mail that requires us to employ a full-fledged html parser as an additional attack surface for security holes - and you instantly risk getting blocked.

Additionally html signatures with images make searching for "this one mail that contains an attachment" hard as every mail contains this image => if you were willing to write a full html editor for mails including providing the possibility to place images relative to the canvas/to the text, the logic that attaches them to any mail if needed and to make them scale accordingly to the screen resolution and size (possibly allowing to make the layout of the signature auto-adjust if the screen is a 9:20 aspect ratio cellphone) I cannot guarantee someone will include it in a mail client whose main advantages are that this client is simple, is using only a small amount of resources and fast.

If you instead want k9 to be able to load an html file and to attach it to every sent mail k9 wouldn't need to be equipped with a big html editor but as html comes in many flavours and since it can reference external files that still would make k9 unnecessarily big.

As I am no k9 developer, but just an user who likes k9 to be simple this opinion might greatly differ from the one of the real developers, though.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/k-9-mail/186B568E-63FC-4BF6-9EB4-3597156FCCA1%40gmail.com.

[Theo Moye]

The annoying thing as I see it is that K9 mail lets you click links in received emails, but doesn't allow you to add links in your signatures, which I too would like. So as I see it K9 does support HTML, just not when it comes to sending.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/k-9-mail/CAMcFxV23%3Dyo9C5DDXD_iCV9AKDORj742LRObJugxoW3%3DkLaBWA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Gunter Königsmann]

If you include a link in a text-only mail you send normally the receiving mail program makes it clickable. No html is needed for that, in all cases I know except perhaps for pine which I used many years ago and which doesn't support clicking.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/k-9-mail/22bcd196-af4a-a578-92b0-dedd689c86bb%40gmail.com.

[Pen Dragon]

On Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 10:37:19 AM UTC-5, Gunter Königsmann wrote:

If you include a link in a text-only mail you send normally the receiving mail program makes it clickable. No html is needed for that

 

HTML will allow hyperlinks in images however. Images in signatures with hyperlinks embedded.

From one of my earlier post:

I myself want it, so I can automatically insert pictures as buttons (pictures with links, like with a small picture of a Facebook logo, that goes to my profile).

Something ideally like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DXVeJRUizw

Regards, Pen

[Yo Blo]

I've been using K-@ mail pro for years now (a fork of K-9) as they allow rich text signatures and I need to be able to include my proper signature from work when I am away from my computer. Unfortunately, K-@ is no longer updated but it still works. K-9 users have been asking for YEARS for a rich text or at least for the possibility to include an HTML file as a signature ... but the developers clearly don't care.

Perhaps K-9 should be marketed not to the general public but to plain-email fanatics and geeks only.