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But with remotely loaded img tags (automated emails don’t send images as static base64) that email is far from an immutable paper trail like how a PDF is.

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jasonfarnon 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree, the ship sailed a long time ago. I have been archiving my emails since the 90s. Sometime around 2010 all the remotely loading emails came along, and since then I've several times gone back to look at an invite or announcement and find nothing but an html tag. I guess an archiver that would need print all my emails to a pdf or image file to preserve it, like the emails that show up in litigation. The tools I was using, gmvault or google's takeout, aren't made for this path we're on.

	▲	philsnow 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm commenting on this way way too late for anybody to read it except for jasonfarnon, but: Doesn't gmail prefetch / proxy img srcs, in order to not give away tracking/open information to the sender? Or is that something they did a while back but then turned off... Anyway, it would be so lovely when you do a takeout of your gmail data, if they could give you both the original and also a version that had the src rewritten to either a base64-encoded copy of the image or a local file that's included in the takeout dump.

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Nifty3929 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, of course, and that's why it's best not to put the important information into and image. Of course, many senders do this anyway, but at least it requires them to send me an image. No different really than sending me a link to the important information as I mentioned in my post.

But let's not make this even easier or default please. It's bad enough as-is.

A nice improvement would be for prominent clients like gmail to default to NOT display images. This would force bulk-senders (including legitimate ones) to stop putting the important info in images most of the time.

Ditto with links - maybe the clients should stop making them clickable, forcing the user to copy-paste the link. Not sure about this one...

	▲	chii 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		There's been a recent trend to add animated gifs into email, where the gif is a never ending stream. It's often a timer/countdown to the end of a sale or something. This would be so that even if the server remotely fetched the gif, it would never end, and thus either consume the available resources on the server, or they give up.