Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of &quot;great, thank you &quot; emails.<p>Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you&#x27;re genuinely thankful!

Apple added the same thing for iMessage&#x2F;SMS. It worked as expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get spammed with ‘{person} liked “{message}”’.<p>In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.

I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that&#x27;s not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.

Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn&#x27;t willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is

I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.<p>Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.

This solution breaks DKIM - it inserts new postfix headers. You can do the same thing in Thunderbird by going into the config editor and adding your own &quot;x-ms-reactions: disallow&quot; headers as per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kb.mozillazine.org&#x2F;Custom_headers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kb.mozillazine.org&#x2F;Custom_headers</a>

Every day a new form of cancer.

Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room.<p>Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.

To be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too? IMO the fallback, that internally it’s just a regular, human-readable email, is quite neat (though I wonder how they dealt with other languages than English - do they know which language the email is in? Is it just always English? That’d be bad).<p>I work on a chat component library (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talkjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talkjs.com</a>) and we support both emoji reactions and email notifications for missed chat messages. These emails can be replied to and they show up as chat messages in the conversation. It’d be very natural for us to add reaction support to the emails too, but I’d be reluctant to do so if it means a great UX for Outlook users but a terrible UX (overload of little reaction emails) for the rest.

Reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, which used to mangle IRC messages to pass additional metadata.

Oh, this is good to know! I haven&#x27;t encountered this issue personally yet, but maybe once I&#x27;ve updated my mailserver, I won&#x27;t encounter it in the future.<p>Now to figure out how to stop the same thing happening in SMS.

Years ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by producing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Comic_Chat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft_Comic_Chat</a> - IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren&#x27;t hidden in normal IRC clients.<p>All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users and didn&#x27;t want to work at establishing it themselves at the time.<p>(The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel)<p>Feels very similar where MS&#x27; entire philosophy is, if it works for us, we don&#x27;t care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly.<p>Course it doesn&#x27;t work that way, Sys-admins just end up banning&#x2F;filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.

The reaction email doesn&#x27;t have some specific header that can be used to block it?

It was annoying when Apple did this with SMS. I haven&#x27;t seen it yet in my workplace, maybe our admins found a way to turn it off?

&quot;Or you can use a mail client from this century.&quot; --the IT guy from my former job

Microsoft have made several oopsies in the past ignoring opt-outs, i.e. OneDrive.

I haven&#x27;t seen this type of messages. Where is it coming from?

Or, you know, you could just turf all e-mails with those &quot;reacted to your message&quot; Subject: headers, and not use any MS specific headers in what you send.<p>This reaction thing seems like a gift from Microsoft to spammers. E-mail recipients have a &quot;like&quot; button that instantly generates a reply, validating that the e-mail address is staffed.

This is exactly the sort of thing that unix old timers would have done. Funny its getting disliked cause it&#x27;s microsoft

Now if only there were a way to prevent iPhone users from sending reactions to my SMS messages!

This kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have, where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device&#x27;s contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;windows_10_wi_fi_sense&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;windows_10_wi_fi_sens...</a><p>It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it&#x27;s just one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.

Ugh that is stupid. Outlook&#x2F;Exchange already add a bunch of custom headers - you&#x27;d think they could use those to opt-in clients that are known to support this feature instead of making the rest of the world opt-out. That approach would provide a better experience for both Outlook users (since they would always know who could actually receive their reactions) and non-Outlook users (who wouldn&#x27;t have to put up with the annoying reaction spam).

I don&#x27;t have strong feelings about this, but can someone please change the emoji palette in Teams? I feel like I&#x27;m typing in Club Penguin chat.

This is the &quot;extend&quot; part of &quot;EEE&quot;, where companies try to make it a nuisance to not use their products based on a standard tech stack.

It&#x27;s pretty amazing how Microsoft has consistently been shitting all over E-mail for the last 30 years or so. I still remember how Outlook was introduced in the 90s and E-mail started going down the drain because of it.

I love the thumbs up on email. Even outside of outlook world, I’d rather get the robot template than have to open something to figure out it’s a sentence or two saying “ok.”