Re: high time email clients, as a default
No, it would be REALLY stupid for many residential users of email, who can only send via their ISP's SMTP and also people using loads of email addresses on their personal domains that are automatically forwarded to some other mailbox.
The problem with email goes much deeper, a lack of any whitelisting and blacklisting in the design at the start. Retrofitted adaptions break email. Only some completely different system will solve it. Then there is the change over problem (see IP4 and IP6). The designers of email learnt NOTHING from the exploits of optical telegraph/semaphore (the Clacks was real once and spanned Europe at time of Napoleon), wired telegraph, analogue phone (POTS), POTS & Fax with caller ID (it HAS to allow spoofed return numbers due to PABX/Network design limitations on sending from one line and receptionist handling reply on another number as well as other issues.). ISDN was designed to interwork with POTS inc Analogue Fax as well as do digital voice, fax, data etc. So was still "broken" regarding lack of whitelist & blacklist mechanisms inherent to design.
There is no sensible reliable way to separate malicious from innocent email. You can sanitise by having no scripts, no remote content and display the real link for all link text (why do you need to hover and see status bar?). Plenty of stupid valid emails have also links that don't match text because the EVIL legitimate companies are using tracking and cloud services etc not on their own domain, IDIOTS. Paypal, my bank, my ISP all have such idiocy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
