Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Low-tech but effective

Chris Messina's email signature uses a simple mechanism for expressing rights
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant & Open Technology Advocate-at-Large
factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
This email is:   [ ] bloggable    [X] ask first   [ ] private
Of course,  when the thing you want to blog about is the signature itself and not the content of the email, it's unclear how to proceed.....

As I understand the mechanism, Chris uses a Thunderbird AI extension that analyzes the content of outgoing emails for key words and phrases before automatically setting the appropriate privacy switches.

Or maybe something simpler
Yep, I set those manually. Nothing like ASCII for utter UI simplicity and data portability!

Wouldn't it be nice if there were other (enforceable) switches...

This email is: [ ] non-forwardable
                        [ ] non-repliable
                        [ ] non-startsomeinterminablethreadabout"whatisidentity"able

1 comment:

Richard Dale said...

The "unforwardable" option can be done around LiquidMachines technology, which, I believe, wraps conent with a "call home" feature to get authorization to decrypt each time someone else gets it.
--Richard Dale
(Andy's brother)