the verge
The Verge reports on a new change announced by Google: There’s now a good chance they’ll ask you to verify your login when you change certain Gmail settings, adjusting things like IMAP email access or adding email forwarding to a new address. Here’s the details from Google. This is a good thing, meant to prevent stealth account takeovers where you might think everything is fine, but a bad actor could be siphoning mail away without the account’s owner realizing what’s going on. I’m sure it’s going to annoy me, though, since I have a zillion Gmail accounts all with various settings around forwarding and IMAP that I am often modifying. But, I’ll happily put up with it in the name of making Gmail a more secure platform for users.[ H/T: Jennifer Nespola Lantz ]
The poop emoji has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to Elon Musk setting up an auto-response to any emails sent to Twitter’s press contact address that contains nothing but the swirling brown icon. Don’t believe me? Email press@twitter.com and see for yourself.But that’s “only the tip of a brown iceberg,” as it seems to have gotten Sarah Jeong thinking, how do the courts handle the poop emoji? How often does the poop emoji show up in filings? She’ll answer this and more over on the Verge.She also quotes law professor (and long time privacy/internet/email/spam legal expert) Eric Goldman, and it turns out that he published a whole paper on “Emojis and the Law.” I didn’t know this existed yet I am so glad it does. Eric helps us understand the very real concerns about encoding and compatibility, how intellectual property concerns around emoji art can negatively impact
“It’s like Apple’s new Hide My Email feature, but it works everywhere,” according to The Verge. And it’s powered by email platform Fastmail, perhaps a bit of a niche provider, but I mean that in a good way. Founded in 1999, Fastmail hast a long history in the email space (unlike Hey.com) and they seem to know what they’re doing (look at their recent added support for BIMI). If you want to “hide my email” but don’t want to do it via the Apple ecosystem, it sounds like this is really worth checking out.Click here for more information on Masked Email from Fastmail and 1Password.Firefox Relay is another service with a similar aim, perhaps for those who are more into the Mozilla mindset, if there is such a thing. I actually haven’t heard of anybody expressing a lot of interest in this one, have you?The big question for me, for all…