Every wondered how Facebook spoofs Gmail message list snippet text?
61 comments
·May 26, 2025BLKNSLVR
Email version of clickbait headlines. It's fucking gross, but it will never go away because it works. Fuck 'em all.
How long until humans are entirely farm-able? Are we close enough already?
aleph_minus_one
There is a simple solution: delete your Facebook account completely. Problem solved.
cj
No need to delete your account to escape facebook.
Simply turn off notifications. And "pull" entertainment from it if you want, don't let it push content to you.
I find myself going weeks without opening facebook. I still enjoy the occasional doom scroll, but it feels better when I know I'm doing it and not accidentally getting sucked in.
aleph_minus_one
> No need to delete your account to escape facebook.
Perhaps. But deleting your Facebook account makes solving the problem of escaping Facebook so much easier.
sneak
Obvious, but worth repeating: it goes away when you delete your facebook account. Stop using gmail.
You cannot control others. You _can_ control yourself.
Don’t be the honey in the trap of big tech surveillance platforms. Being on these platforms legitimizes and encourages their use for your friends and family.
Delete your facebook and instagram. Sell or trash your oculus. Buy a domain and email hosting and migrate off your gmail.
sureIy
Unfortunately some people want to have some semblance of social life and in some circles dropping Instagram means decimating your pool.
aleph_minus_one
> in some circles dropping Instagram means decimating your pool
Rather: dropping Instagram means improving the (average) quality of the people in your pool. :-)
djaychela
But that definitely isn't everyone and the more people who reject your normalisation of this, the less strength there will be to it. And social life certainly doesn't look like Instagram statistics monitoring to me.
robertlagrant
That's a conflicting requirement. You can't want to be free of drugs and also keep doing heroin because all your friends do it.
sneak
This doesn’t get better by ignoring the problem.
This is the social equivalent of just throwing your hands up and saying “it can’t be helped”.
I cannot stress this enough: it _is not_ true. Deleting your IG will not cause your friends to stop being your friends.
Being on these platforms legitimizes their use. It makes the situation _worse_. It is a vote for surveillance and censorship of your most intimate personal connections.
HenryBemis
Facebook could implement the feature that could tell you which of your friends is within walking distance, so you can grab a coffee, but nope. Also facebook = cancer, and unfortunately now we have more cancers (TikTok, etc.)
JimDabell
In several mail clients, for multipart emails, the snippet is taken from the plaintext part while the email is rendered from the HTML part. So if you see something in the snippet that you don’t see when you read the email, then it’s possible it’s only in the plaintext part.
chrisjj
This text is absent from this message's plain text part.
mcintyre1994
A bunch of places do this! Audible does “top picks for you”, LinkedIn does “recommended actions for you”
I remember at an old company downloading email templates and loads of them would have some kind of preview text field that used this trick.
lysace
HTML email was a mistake. I believe the guilty party is Microsoft with Outlook 97.
superjan
In my recollection it was Netscape, this appers to confirm it:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...
weinzierl
From my recollection Microsoft pushed their own RTF like rich mail format hard for a while and did support HTML only reluctantly.
account42
They still support HTML only reluctantly.
donnachangstein
Thanks for linking to a picture of testicles.
stickfigure
That particular blog author displays special content if the referrer is HN. It's embarrassingly juvenile for someone that must be in their 50s by now.
superjan
Oh sorry, I did not know that was the guy who hates being linked to from HN. Copy the link manually to read it if you still care to learn what he wrote.
pwdisswordfishz
Well, HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake. This could have been avoided by a profile of HTML that removes presentation markup and CSS, leaving only pure semantic markup that a client can render in a "reader mode" equivalent.
lproven
> HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake.
No, I agree with the original comment.
Formatting is bad for accessibility, bad for spoofing and spamming, bad for quoting and highlighting, and more besides.
It is bad in general. Always was.
diggan
Well, except for the case when you want a unique-looking email, with your own style, then plaintext kind of sucks :)
Sure, we could argue that people shouldn't want that, but then reality tends to be somewhat annoying like that.
k4rli
Some sites don't even bother anymore and just send the contents as a multi-MB image. Sort of "pdf as email" to not bother checking if the template works for all sorts of mail clients.
macguillicuddy
I wonder if, in the pipe dream that email were magically replaced by something more modern, we'd use something like markdown instead.
chrisjj
How would that help here?
zzo38computer
I use a email client without HTML email. I have not had problems with this.
ninjin
You are not the only one and whenever there is no text/plain there is webdump:
scarface_74
I think Apple is the guilty party of starting it first with OpenDoc based CyberDog released in 1996.
kyralis
Can we really blame OpenDoc for anything, though? It seems more sad than impactful, honestly.
robocat
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
Interesting because everybody was competing: but competing for a concept that is now largely obsolete because it failed?
Some modern competition (e.g. AI) has a similar feel.
sokoloff
OpenDoc did at least provide part of the question’s premise for one of my favorite Steve Jobs answers:
scarface_74
I was on Usenet at the time and Apple also had a newsreader. There were post from Mac users with Mime encoded messages that everyone else hated.
sureIy
HTML was a mistake.
What if browsers just returned texts with links and auto-linked and auto-embedded them like markdown does? Only on request. A true user agent.
Well, I would have settled for HTML 1 for the forms.
iamacyborg
Email preview text is very well documented at this point.
https://www.litmus.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-preview-te...
eimrine
If you will mark as spam those messages, Gmail will return them after few months.
Hamuko
I feel like I've had pretty good experience with mark as spam working. But I try to first do a regular unsubscribe from messages and really only resort to marking as spam when unsubscribing doesn't work or has been made intentionally difficult (like requiring login).
eimrine
I want those subscriptions be active but only inside the borders of FB. I do not want to unsubscribe from everything just because I visit FB once a year or less. Those guys are my friends or schoolmates. But if FB provided that kind of instrument which unsubscribes from everything at once, I would do this just for the sake of being nice to Facebook, I understand that these annoying messages are not exactly a spam. For example, I never use their private message features, so I really do not need those 17 emails per day.
nilirl
This is not a spoof?
Previews are an optional protocol that email clients have followed for a while now.
iamacyborg
Referring to them as a protocol is misunderstanding how these things are created, imo.
It’s not unlikely that inbox providers will just use AI to generate these based on the email content in the near future.
nilirl
You're right. It is not a protocol.
Each client implements previews differently and they don't specify how.
chrisjj
> Email clients have this concept of “preview text” which gives insight into what’s inside the email before you open.
This isn't previewing what's inside the email.
tomnipotent
This is called preview text/preview header and is even supported by email service providers like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. It's been common practice for going on fifteen years.
gwd
I was going to say, when you send bulk mail with Brevo, they explicitly prompt you for what the "preview text" should look like, and show how it might look on an iPhone Mail or desktop Gmail.
nokun7
I have seen Nextdoor also do the same and I had alway wondered. I believe it uses the same mechanism. Quite interesting.
axegon_
Disclosure: I do not have a facebook account and I am not a lawyer. But... I am pretty sure that's in breach of several EU regulations if this is happening to EU citizens and EU residents: DSA, GDPR, ePrivacy directive, consumer protection and possibly misleading advertising and unfair commercial practices.
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RainbowJ
[dead]
E.g. Gmail inbox shows a message contains "XXX tagged you on Facebook. Take a look about what she said on you."
But when you open the message, there's no "Take a look about what she said on you."
Answer. The text is present but hidden:
<span style=3D"color:#FFFFFF;font-size:1px;opacity:0;">Take a look at what she said about you.</span>
And unsurprisingly whenever I do click through, I find she hasn't said anything about me.