xP Design Policies


1. HTML Messages
2. No Libc5 Support
 

HTML Messages

Because Pine has provided functionality for HTML e-mail reading, xP will do so likewise.

However, there is a disturbing trend among mailing list providers and some e-mail clients that is invading many users' privacy.  This is the practice of embedding the following tag in e-mail messages:

<img src="http://www.foo.com/tracker.gif" height=1 width=1>

Because the image is 1 pixel by 1 pixel, and often transparent, the user never notices it.  But when the e-mail client requests the graphic from www.foo.com, an entry is generated in the server's log which indicates the time and location when and where the user is reading his/her e-mail.  More insidious, some image tags reference a cgi script which store the user's e-mail motions in a database profile.

Therefore, the xP HTML e-mail policy is such:

NO html messages may request network content.  If any image or script tag specifies a source file that is not attached to the message, then the tag is supressed and the user is given a security warning.

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No Libc5 Support

As much as it pains me, xP cannot offer Libc5 support. This frustrates me because I have a system running RedHat Linux 4.2 which will not be able to run xP unless I upgrade to glibc2, which requires a whole host of other upgrading issues. C'est la vie. The reason for this limitation is because LinuxThreads (a pthreads implementation for Linux) is unreliable on libc5. xP depends greatly on LinuxThreads, so we can't chance it.

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