Enhancing Email Functionality using Late Bound Content
This addresses the problem of inflexible email functionality for users and developers, though it is an incremental improvement that works within existing infrastructure.
The paper tackles the static nature of email communication by introducing late bound content, a technique that defers message content binding via image lazy-loading, enabling email senders and third parties to update delivered emails after sending.
Email is one of the most successful computer applications yet devised. Communication features in email, however, have remained relatively static in years. We investigate one way of expanding email functionality without modifying the existing email infrastructure. We introduce email late bound content, a simple and generalizable technique that defers message content binding through image lazy-loading. Parts of an email are converted into external images embedded in HTML code snippets, making it so that email clients will defer the image download (i.e. content binding) until the moment users open the email. This late bound content allows email senders and third party services to update delivered emails. To illustrate the utilities of late bound content, we present four new example features and discuss the tradeoffs of email content late binding.