Jeff over at Coding Horror has just been taking a small pop at
Yelp for requiring email account access to find friends
Email is the de-facto master password for a huge swath of your online identity. Tread carefully:
* As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It's unethical. It's irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
* As a user, you should never provide your email credentials to anyone except your email service. Sites that ask you for this information are to be regarded with extreme suspicion if not outright distrust.
This is the same terrible system used by many large social networks, and 2 scripts I recently strongly advised internet marketers not to use.
- Optin Accelerator - due to be relaunched soon
- Then there was Viral Optin Generator
- Coming soon is Viral Inviter which has some redeeming qualities, it works with old address books from Outlook etc, but it is still asking for highly personal passwords, and there are some other security faults.
Viral Inviter, with even heavier marketing and endorsements, will have a huge long-term
negative effect on email marketing, with the rewards quickly being overtaken by a backlash of negative sentiment and poorer email delivery which will be universal.
Plurk which has very recently become very popular also suffers from this
evil invite and finding friends method, but at least has a redeeming feature.
Gmail Team – Please Fix These First
I know the new additions to Gmail are just tweaks, and mainly created in Google "20% time" but these little problems cause me no end of frustration.
Gmail Spam False Positives
I have to read my spam folder daily, because it gets sometimes 200 spam email messages, and within that may be as many as 5% false positives.
These are emails I want to receive, which I have signed up to receive, I have confirmed a subscription with a full "double opt-in" process, and are from senders I previously had no problems receiving email from.
Some examples are occasional emails from list owners