Article not recent but interesting to note what it says
....
http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2002/2002-10-10.htm
6) IncrediMail Problems (Part One)
Hi Fred, I'm a network administrator for a large Reservation in
Minnesota.
One of my users asked me if it would be all right to install a new
E-mail
client package called Incredimail, I checked out the
http://www.incredimail.com website and noticed stellar
recommendations from
Cnet, ZDnet, and Tucows so I downloaded the demo to check it out.
What I
found in the user agreement for the software was pretty
unbelievable,
obviously the people who recommended this software didn't read it.
The
agreement itself is extremely long... but the attached excerpt from
the
agreement almost knocked me out of my chair:
"10. UNSOLICITED MATERIALS
Any confidential, secret or proprietary information or other
material
submitted or sent to IncrediMail, including without limitation via
any
Message sent by You through the Service, Site, or IncrediMail's
physical
mail and e-mail addresses, or in any other way, will be deemed to
be not
confidential or secret. By submitting or sending information or
other
material to IncrediMail or by posting information on any portion of
the
Service you (a) Warrant that you have all rights of any kind to the
material
and that to the best of your knowledge no other party has any
rights to the
material; and (b) Grant IncrediMail an unrestricted, perpetual,
irrevocable
license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit and
distribute
the material, and you further agree that IncrediMail is free to use
any
ideas, know-how, concepts or techniques you send us or post on the
Service
for any purpose, without any compensation to you or any other
person."
I'm not a reactionary person by nature but the implication of
that
paragraph for the average user is staggering. I always tell my
users to read
every agreement carefully but of course many don't, this agreement
is
especially long and loaded with legalspeak to further guarantee
that the
average person won't read it all. People are ultimately responsible
for
their own actions but I believe that this particular company goes
way too
far in misleading people about their ultimate goal and someone
needs to
shine a light on them and make people aware of what's really going
on, at
least then they can make an informed choice about using the
service. I'm a
subscriber to several technical newsletters and I'm writing to all
of them.
Thank you for your time, love your newsletter. --- Ed McPhail
Some of that language is similar to that used by other mail
services and
ISPs to get around copyright issues that can innocently arise
when
proprietary information is sent through a third party--- for
example, it's
not uncommon for an ISP to want to ensure they're not violating a
copyright
if they merely store a copy of your mail on their servers while
it's being
processed.
But I can't think of any innocent reason for the phrasing that
states "...
IncrediMail is free to use any ideas, know-how, concepts or
techniques
you... post on the Service for any purpose, without any
compensation to you
or any other person." Maybe there is a perfectly inoffensive reason
for
including that, but it eludes me.
There's also another reason not to like IncrediMail, too: See next
item.
Click to email this item to a friend
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page
7) IncrediMail Problems (Part Two)
There's another reason not to like IncrediMail, too: It's
HTML-based, which
not only opens the door to all manner of web-borne security threats
that are
absent from text-based email, but also adds tons of baggage to
outbound
IncrediMail email. This extra baggage can clog the inboxes of
recipients of
these mails, even if the recipients aren't IncrediMail users.
For example, the headers of email sent by Outlook Express might
take this
simple form:
From: [user name and address]
To: {recipient's name and address}
Subject:
Date:
MIME-Version 1.0 Content-Type multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0007_01C263C7.DB858E80"
X-Priority 3
X-MSMail-Priority Normal
X-Mailer Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
But here's an actual IncrediMail header, snipped from a reader's
note to me:
From: [user name and address]
To: {recipient's name and address}
Subject:
Date:
Content-Type
Multipart/related;type="multipart/alternative";boundary=
"------------Boundary-00=_NVWB7TH0000000000000"
X-Mailer IncrediMail 2001 (1750710)
X-FID 9FF122EE-7F22-11D4-AE37-00010216CD0D
X-FVER 2.0
X-FIT Letter
X-FCOL Autumn
X-FCAT Nature
X-FDIS Vine Fall
X-Extensions SU1CTDEsNDEsgUmBScU4OIWRkSwsTZ04kZFNhYUoiU0k
LJWdTYGBgYWBkYWZNCiBKEksSU1CTDIsMCwsSU1CTDMsMCws
X-BG
X-BGT repeat
X-BGC #f5e0c3
X-BGPX 0px
X-BGPY 0px
X-ASN A5BE2A00-37CC-11D4-BA36-0050DAC68030
X-ASNF 0
X-ASH A5BE2A00-37CC-11D4-BA36-0050DAC68030
X-ASHF 1
X-AN 6486DDE0-3EFD-11D4-BA3D-0050DAC68030
X-ANF 0
X-AP 6486DDE0-3EFD-11D4-BA3D-0050DAC68030
X-APF 1
X-AD C3C52140-4147-11D4-BA3D-0050DAC68030
X-ADF 0
X-AUTO X-ASN,X-ASH,X-AN,X-AP,X-AD
X-CNT ;
X-Priority 3
Note that none of that is the actual email message--- it's just the
typical
extra baggage IncrediMail adds to the email header before you even
get to
the message itself: An extra 600 characters or so (call it roughly
5
kilobits) of code that must be sent by the mailer, processed by the
ISPs of
both the mailer and the recipient, and then downloaded and
processed by the
recipient for each and every IncrediMail message sent. Yikes! HTML
email is
bloated anyway, but man, IncrediMail pushes it to new
extremes.
Yes, IncrediMail provides amusing, all-singing, all dancing,
animated,
colored, formatted, flashing, bleeping, blurping emails--- but with
the
certainty of tons of excess baggage riding along with the email;
with the
possibility of opening the door to malicious HTML-borne worms,
viruses, and
such; and with serious questions about who owns the content of the
messages
you send using their system.
No, thanks.
