On 2024-03-07 07:30, Sebastian Nielsen via mailop wrote:
Emoji is such a stupid thing.
You are entitled to your opinion, which I do not dislike. HOWEVER, let's focus on facts, not on opinions, because emojis add more than annoyances.
Specifically to mailop, malicious actors are known to add emojis trying to trick users into trusting their messages by mimicking verification icons or eliciting/manipulating emotional reactions. Apologies to all mailops for my attempt to play with the feature on this very message - I had no idea what the output would be before hitting send.
My most important reason to "filter" emojis in email addresses and subject lines would be to assign them higher spammyness scores in rspamd or SpamAssassin. Are there already such rules? If not, how do I add them?
Filtering emojis out of display at the client may be a good idea too, to blunt the spammer's intended effect. Maybe replace them all with =F0=9F=92=A9 ? Sadly, my recent experience with mail clients is that most of those I have looked at are developing in directions that I find not useful.
The technical discussion about email clients and server crashing on UTF is also interesting, though here emojis are not at fault. Some users may want to use the same colorful brush quoted above on the software or its developers rather than on the expanding UTF character set.
In my line of business, emojis have given rise to a whole industry of interpretation. I only do civil law, so to me it is a balance of probability matter whether 👌 means contract accepted or, as it does in some cultures, asshole. But in criminal law, where the stakes are higher, there are entire dissertations written about what meaning do criminal gangs assign to the different emojis and like with any human language, there are local variations. Cases of sexual assault have hinged on late night texting of vegetable emojis. Lucky mailops the decisions to be made regarding emojis are neither so dramatic nor so life altering.
-- Yuval Levy, JD, MBA, CFA Ontario-licensed lawyer _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
