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Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.

It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.

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It's not really about ordinary users like you. Google is shifting their strategy for Google Drive more towards enterprise, and this is a useful feature for enterprise users. Have you ever seen one of those email signatures stating "this email is property of XXX corporation, etc. etc." or seen an email sent to a large group of people in a company with strong exhortations not to send it anywhere else? This is a strict improvement over that. Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure. But people were already using email for sensitive information, and this decreases the ways the information can get leaked from negligence or active subversion to just subversion.

> Yes, people can actively work around the printing restriction, so it's not 100% secure.

And the people that do work around it in order to violate company policy can be dealt with here in meatspace.

Eg: HR -- "We didn't want you printing that sensitive email.... why did you go out of your way to print it?"

And by doing so, it is still violating what the user expects.

e-MAIL. The stress is on the mail part. When your Grandfather sends a letter via post, he doesn't expect it to be his anymore, does he?

No. He bloody well expects what comes through the door with his name on it to be his to do with as he pleases.

That's the other way around. The grandfather is the one receiving the email that he can't print.

I misunderstood the parent. Sorry, and you are right.

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