Four warnings, in Privacy & safety, and all of them start switched off.
That is not timidity. A client that begins by interrupting is one people
learn to click through, and a warning clicked through without reading
costs the same attention and buys nothing. The outside-sender warning
could not be on by default in any case: it measures against the domains
that count as yours, and with nothing configured every message in the
mailbox is from outside.
Your own identity domains are always internal and are not configuration.
An account signed in as [email protected] warning that example.com is
external would be absurd, and making it be typed in first is a foot-gun
that leaves the feature useless the moment it is enabled. Configured
domains are additional, and cover their subdomains -- matched on a dot
boundary, so example.com covers mail.example.com and not notexample.com,
which is exactly the domain somebody registers on purpose.
The four:
A banner names the sender's domain on a message from outside.
Sending outside names the outside recipients and asks, rather than
refusing. "This is going outside" is a rule and not something the sender
can check; a list of addresses is. It reads the full identity list rather
than the visible one, since hiding an identity from the From menu does not
make its domain somebody else's.
Sending to a large group asks once the count crosses a threshold, which is
what catches a reply-all onto a long thread. It counts people rather than
headers, so one address in To and nine in Cc is a message to ten.
Opening a link asks when the destination is not trusted, and always when
the link's text names one domain while its destination is another -- even
where that destination is trusted, because being trusted is not the same
as being the place the text claimed. On that mismatch the offer to trust
the domain is withheld: what would be trusted is the destination, and the
destination is not the thing in question. Anything that is not http or
https is left alone, since warning about a mailto: is noise and noise is
how a warning stops being read. Both bodies are covered, because a link in
a plain-text mail is linkified by us and points wherever it likes just as
readily as one the sender marked up.
The click is cancelled and the navigation re-issued after the answer,
since there is no way to hold a real navigation open across a dialog. The
reopen runs in the continuation of the dialog's own click, which is still
the gesture a popup blocker wants to see.
General had grown five unrelated headings and was where anything without
an obvious home ended up. Remote images were filed under "Reading", the
read-receipt policy under "Composing", the undo-send window beside the
default message format. They are the same kind of decision -- what reaches
a sender, and what asks before something happens -- and they were the
hardest settings in the app to find.
Privacy & safety now holds all six, in three groups: remote content, read
receipts, and the things that ask before it is too late. General keeps
what it is actually about and is thirty lines shorter.
The line against Security & sessions is worth stating, because two similar
words next to each other in a nav is how a menu becomes something people
hunt through. Security & sessions is credentials and access: password,
two-factor state, app passwords, live sessions. Privacy & safety is how
the app behaves towards the reader and towards senders.
Nothing moved in storage. Settings are a flat object in settings.json and
sections are only how they are grouped on screen, so this is a UI change
with no migration and no key renames.
Two things beyond the move.
The senders trusted with remote images are now listed and can be withdrawn
one at a time. A sender was added from a message and could then only be
removed by finding another message from that same sender, which is not a
way to review a list you cannot see.
And General's lead said settings are stored in this browser, which is only
true when the server has no FileNode support. They normally live in the
account's own Files and follow it between devices, so the sentence
contradicted the feature it sat above.
jcoffey-dev