This comment thread reminds me a bit of "The Emperor's new clothes". I think the code for sieve (even though I understood what it did) is way too unnecessarily confusing and I would not want to see it in a project I'm on.
However, I do appreciate the usefulness of lazy evaluation. Still, I think this documentation could benefit by not making outlandish claims ("it will change the way you think") and just saying the author has implemented lazy evaluation in javascript (and maybe link to the wikipedia article on lazy evaluation and this stack overflow to explain why it's useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2151226/what-are-the-adva...)
If your project team has people comfortable with functional programming - there's absolutely nothing wrong with that code.
As far as changing the way you think, it certainly came as a shock for me when I encountered it years ago in SICP and I'm still enjoying the benefits of lazy sequences in Clojure and ClojureScript.
I'm sorry you feel this way. You can opt-out of emails sent to you from free EmailOracle accounts. Maybe we should add to our website the ability to automatically opt-out of all future tracking?
I just wanted to say that I take you at your word followed by a modest version of the interdiction below, but then I noticed your fine piece of corporate doublespeak of only allowing opt-out against mail from free users of your service, which allows you to show a pretense of trying to do the right thing while at the same time co-opting those concerned about your offering into providing arguments for up-selling your customers.
So I once and for all forbid you to include any of your tracking technology into any message that is sent or forwarded to any email address that I currently use or own, or which I will at any time in the future use or own. In addition, I also forbid you to collect, store, process or share any information related to any email sent to or recieved by me or any email account I can access, or related to any device or software I may use to access this mail. And no, I am not mad or gullible enough to tell someone so completely lacking in moral judgement as to even think about implementing a feature like that and then defending it in the way you do any information about my email adresses, to protect them against being sold to other equally dishonest email senders, or abused in other ways.
A pre-emptive opt-out could work, but how exactly would you implement it?
Do I have to give you all my email addresses that I want to opt-out with?
Do I have to get an "optout" cookie so that the server with the tracking pixels and whatnot knows not to track me?
I think I'd rather block this at the email client level. This way I don't have to trust anyone's optout procedures, as well as being protected from any nefarious trackers that don't care about things such as opting-out.
Yes, users are free to still continue whatever means they have used in the past to opt-out, including at the client level. We don't (and can't) prevent any of that.
Of course you can't prevent it, however one of your application's goals is to work around email client filters that would block traditional tracking methods. Just to be clear, I have no problem with what you are doing.
I would like to know if blocking images is enough to not be tracked. Do email clients have sufficient image blocking or do they let through images specified in CSS (or similar) through?
Candidly, you already know who wants to opt out: they have images blocked. If you really want to do the right thing, don't add more tricky tracking mechanisms than hidden images.
edit: apparently this feature already exists in a clearer, more concise fashion.
How about mandating a footer that discloses the tracking feature and has a one click opt-out link:
"The email you are reading is using EmailOracle tracking to notify the sender upon first read in order to provide you with better service. If you would like to opt-out of all tracking from EmailOracle, please [click here]. To learn more about this product [click here]"
EmailOracle does build this feature right into Gmail :)
It adds a link in the left panel of Gmail (under "Contacts") that lets you open up a new pane (just like the "Tasks" pane) that contains all of your emails needing follow-up.
To help alleviate this concern there is opt-out for emails received from free EmailOracle accounts (there is a link at the bottom of the email that says "Metrics by EmailOracle, click here to opt-out").
That is too late. Collecting data like this is only legitimate (or, if the reciever is european, legal) if the collection only ever starts after the collecting party has recieved a qualified declaration of consent from the reciever of the bugged mail.
If they don't get this consent before sending the mail, they are just scum.
That is good feedback and we should make that more clear. To answer your question, the domain admin (when he installs the gadget for the domain) gives us access to each email header as you open the email. To install Etacts, the user clicks through an openid+oauth login screen that details which services we use (gmail and google contacts).
Are you somehow only limited to the headers or simply only using the headers?
3rd party access (beyond the email provider) to someone's entire mailbox seems like a hard sell. The product sounds compelling, but I'd be much more inclined if it were something like a local browser plugin.
It's not a browser plugin. It is a web component that Gmail hosts in an IFrame (or caja wrapper?). Your domain administrator must grant API access to the plugin provider's API key.
This was Etacts. We responded to Antonio's support email this morning within a few minutes of its arrival to let him know the IP address in question belongs to us. We are talking about ways now to prevent this type of confusion from happening in the future.
However, I do appreciate the usefulness of lazy evaluation. Still, I think this documentation could benefit by not making outlandish claims ("it will change the way you think") and just saying the author has implemented lazy evaluation in javascript (and maybe link to the wikipedia article on lazy evaluation and this stack overflow to explain why it's useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2151226/what-are-the-adva...)