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> The whole magic of the site is being able to have the experience of looking over other people's shoulders into their inbox, and seeing how they actually talk with one another when they're not on stage.

I am having a hard time understanding if this is written sincerely or as satire.

I hope you are being humorous here because if this is indeed true, it does not look like something I would appreciate. I really don't want anyone to have the experience of looking over my shoulders into my inbox to see how I actually talk with others when I am not on stage.

I have always perceived email as a private mode of communication. Has this perception changed recently among the new generation of application developers?

I feel like everyone here is misinterpreting what the author meant. The site doesn't publish your messages without consent. In fact, from their FAQ:

> When uploading a thread as an individual, we email a permission request to each non-anonymized person who contributed at least one message to conversation. A thread will only go live if there is unanimous consent. This means that if even one person hits 'Decline' or doesn't respond to the permission request, the thread will remain private.

"Permission requests are becoming optional": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460708

"Unfortunately going from just the last email in the thread to being able to reconstruct the entire thread would be exceedingly difficult."

Good. That's the way it should be.

"The whole magic of the site is being able to have the experience of looking over other people's shoulders into their inbox, and seeing how they actually talk with one another when they're not on stage."

What you call "magic" is a blatant and disgusting violation of my privacy. Those messages are "not on stage" for a reason; if I wanted them to be "on stage", then I would put them there myself. You have no business "looking over [my] shoulder" at all, let alone inviting everyone else in the world to do so.

> Also, being able to use DKIM / SPF / DMARC / ARC to ensure the authenticity of conversations is very important to us.

Are you sure you have really tried? when you forward an email, it includes all the headers you need to for your validations.

It only includes the headers of the last email in the thread. But that doesn't guarantee that the person forwarding the email hasn't changed what someone else wrote in the quoted reply text. To me that's actually a serious security issue, and in the long term is more serious than the OAuth thing (which I'm confident that Google will eventually fix).

If I'm wrong and it's possible to do then by all means I'll do it though. The one approach that would work is building an InboxSDK plugin and having it forward every message in a thread automatically, because that way you'd have the header of each message. But then the security story is arguably much worse than OAuth.

I don't believe that is correct. If you check the email source, it includes all the emails with their headers.

What email client are you using? In Gmail the only thing I see between quoted replies are blocks like:

--000000000000061f91056a2a279c

Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I'm pretty sure most mail clients will not directly include any of the headers from the original e-mail, unless you do "forward as attachment"