That should be the default behavior, not a special lock down option that also disables other features.

Why can't they just make it like most email clients? No preview by default, give a banner with an option to explicitly allow a preview for that specific message or conversation?

I tend to agree.

But how does that prevent one from receiving and opening a malicious message?

Because many people know not trust unknown senders.

I should have said “a well crafted malicious email” or SMS etc.

No such thing as completely idiot proof. But I think we can all agree an exploit that requires a click is a lot better for the intended victim than one that doesn't. This way they at least have a chance to not click it. Then we can start tackling the other problems with separate solutions

Phishing is big business and ways to combat are not fool proof. Education helps. Spam detection helps.

Education helps, but it puts the burden on the user. The real fix is shutting down the phishing source, not just filtering the symptom.

You know that E-Mail clients blocking stuff came after right?

>That should be the default behavior

It is! The phishers try to socially engineer their way into getting link previews or in fact clickable links period.

Screenshot here of the automatic link/preview disable-

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/phishing-text...

Sorry, but that is an insanely defeatist attitude blended with a hint of blaming users for wanting features.

Image decoders are pure functions and all should have been rewritten as 100% safe Rust years ago.

Users need functionality.

It’s up to us to figure out how to provide that safely.

Saying to users they shouldn’t have those features isn’t sage advice, it’s admitting failure.

The thing is, nobody's happy just previewing jpegs and pngs.

Before you know it, people want to preview SVGs, PDFs, video, HTML and so on.

And to do that properly means you've got to support obscure formats like JBIG2 and CCITT Fax. Malicious vector images with a billion elements to render. XML that lets one file embed another.

And good luck getting the budget to re-implement them all from scratch in a better language, when the only business value the feature delivers is a postage-stamp-sized preview image.

Perfection is the enemy of the perfectly good.

And let's be honest, you'll have what, 0.0001% of users who want to preview CCITT in 2026? Less? Probably less.

It's a part of PDF, so if there's a PDF renderer which makes preview, it supports G4 and JBIG2.

Most of these are solved problems to one degree or another. Web browsers have generally switched over to decoding legacy unsafe formats like PDF using safe managed languages, typically JavaScript.

> JBIG2 and CCITT Fax

Since performance isn't such a critical concern with obscure legacy formats, it really wouldn't be much more than a day or two of work for a competent developer with AI agent tooling to convert an existing decoder to safe Rust.

Meta set nearly a hundred billion dollars on fire for a total failure that everybody saw coming, a trillion dollars is what the current AI investment crazy is pouring into concrete and TSMC chips, but... a couple of days for a developer is asking too much!?

> legacy unsafe formats like PDF using safe managed languages, typically JavaScript.

Are you ironic? If any JS and v8 have tons of CVE's.

Stop being deluded with these hip languages. Rust? you wish. Maybe inferno with proper namespaces AND in-kernel namespace support. No, not like Linux. LIke 9front.

https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=v8&vendor=google

The business value is reduced attack surface which is a marketable attribute. Seems like the exact type of thing Apple would do.

At what point do we just refuse to parse obscure rarely used formats

They are actually pushing Rust quite hard now in Android:

https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-t...

Even to the baseband firmware:

https://blog.google/security/bringing-rust-to-the-pixel-base...

Rust wont save you from malicious SVG+JS files, EPS/PostScript files and so on.

Since it's a pure function, you can even keep using the legacy C code while still putting it in a sandbox: compile to WASM, then AOT transform to native code, and now it runs in the WASM sandbox at practically-native speed.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...

(Of course, new code is preferred in Rust over C, for sure.)