Currently helping an elderly family friend figure out if an email is a scam (which it obviously is) and hey, people who make mobile email apps, it's a dark pattern to not make the email address of the sender visible without needing to click on the little arrow thing.

Just thought you should know.

March 04, 2026 - 16:52 UTC

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Gonna add one more here and say the number of doctors offices that default to text message billing with shortened URLs in the message is infuriating. Offices that do this are training people to fall for scams
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it's also a bug in the entire protocol that a well-formed SMTP mesage can put whatever they want in the "from" field.
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"But then it wouldn't me minimalist!"
Modern UI design is absolute shit because they keep trying to make everything minimalist.l but minimalism is bad design, it too often hides needed information.
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They know, they’re just also in on the scam
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Lately I’ve been thinking that the answer to spam and scam is to make the email provider (sender) liable for like 1-5% of any scam that someone can prove was fallen for by a person of diminished capacity. They’ll clean up this mess faster than anyone can believe.
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If we all need to experience more email sending friction…

That’s probably a net gain for everyone.
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They hide which email they even sent it to, I have multiple. It's maddening.
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I've long held this same peeve about iOS Mail app, as an east coaster trying to help elderly. While revealing the actual email address sure would be grand, showing the actual date and time would be even grander, rather than just "Yesterday" until you tap it. So many have begged for this, for years.
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Yes absolutely this drives me insane!!!
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In the Samsung email app, it is impossible to view the DKIM information for a sender. You cannot actually verify the source of an email isn't spoofed. It's insanity.
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As someone who does that kind of tech support at least twice a month as a volunteer: 💯 This.

(I regularly have elder people come by who are confused about weird messages, so I try my best to explain what to do in such a case)
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Hey now, there's a former department head, who has since moved companies three times, out there somewhere who is very proud of telling someone to squeeze that extra 0.125" of screen space out of the app display
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Try receiving a text message on an iPhone from a contact with more than one number. There is absolutely no way to determine which one originated the message (I’m told iOS 26 brought this particular enshittification).
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I use K-9 as my POP3 email client on my phone. I love it, but yeah, it's annoying to have to click on something to actually see the sender address.
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I've struggled to figure out how to access this information myself and I am an SSWE so idk how we're expecting elderly folks to check it
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i'm fairly certain that the reason (side from a minimalist-looking interface) is that you can take a screenshot of an email and not dox anyone's email

at least that's the reason why gmail started saying “me” instead of your address
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That is definitely a re reasonable reason to do something like that, but microslop, google and apple OWN operating systems. They could just establish a 'do not capture this part of the window'-signal and have their screenshot tools respect that.
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Substituting "me" at least makes sense because it's impossible to spoof and also exactly the receiver's address is less of a problem in general
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That seems like a rationale made with a very poor understanding of agency and autonomy.
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Also forcing a link to load a full page preview before giving me to option to look at the URL.
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My relationship to older not-that-tech-savvy folks makes me very aware of the shit silicon valley types expect to be obvious but really just isn't and this is why I'm begging people in positions of power to hire some midwesterners who care about people.
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@techconnectify.bsky.social C E Ope
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Can't wait for phishing farms to leverage OpenClaw as a source and a target for their attacks.

Imagine these bots prompted into autonomously spilling everything they learned about their users.
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Trying to help my Dad get his iPhone looked at is nearly impossible. He's in his 70s and very willing to go down to the store to get help and he gets blown off every single time, it makes me so angry and I live too far away to physically go over there :(
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100% I can’t tell you how many of my older family members I’ve showed how to use tech
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Unfortunately the only people that are mattering as time goes on are shareholders.
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That costs money and treats customers like they're real humans! Can't we just shove AI into it instead?
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Making tech more accessible is something that can empower us all. And I mean exposing options and information in an understandable way, not removing options and hiding things. We've been going the wrong direction on this everywhere for too long.
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Not just Midwesterners 😌
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And/or some accessibility testers.

(Teams like this are always first on the chopping block whenever they need to layoff staff to appease shareholders - really we need legislation with teeth to force compliance so they can't just fire everyone and bleed institutional knowledge).
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You’d think there would be a single-button option on iOS and android to switch to a high-contrast, larger font, simplified version of the OS. It would help lots of people use phones.
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So many things are obfuscate under layers of menus, hidden options, and overly clever symbology. Please! Just put words I can click on that describe what they do!
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The problem is really just that they (the Silicon Valley C-Suite folks) genuinely do not care.

Someone probably brought up valid concerns and was threatened with losing their job.

That's a genuine pattern over there.

They don't even have unions because, y'know...

Glad IL voted to keep unions
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I work in IT and this is biggest problem we see with phishing emails, random email address with someone in the companies name on it. It wouldn't be as big a problem if microsoft didn't insist on obfuscating email addresses for some reason
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I've dealt with this several times. I can't imagine there aren't millions of other people dealing with the same thing. The tech industry keeps making products that are increasingly more confusing and preditory to seniors. Do these blood sucking tech CEOs not have parents?
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One would think that boomers with their collective spending power would warrant some interest. Developers could easily make a "user friendly" version/mode for basic software. But honestly, the people in my life who need it most wouldn't use it, because it would be patronizing
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@techconnectify.bsky.social I'm absolutely begging modern UX designers to go back and read Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" since apparently modern design trends require everything to be as obtuse as possible.
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Holy SHIT someone else who sees this!! I despise having to use outlook for work and dealing with this stuff. IT likes to simulate phishing attacks to make sure employees aren't clicking every link that's put in front of them, but I've never fallen for them because I *always* check the sender domain.
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If I have to explain to my father yet again that… No, AOL will not contact you on your Yahoo email account to tell you that your credit card was declined. *facepalm* I’ve tried to get him into Apple’s ecosystem where at least he needs to do a FaceID or Fingerprint to do anything administrative.
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Right on
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I subscribe to the belief that we keep poisoning our systems of communication (junk mail, spam calls, phishing emails) and I'd love if, as a collective community who loves trust and safetyand convenience, we could stop doing that.
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The MS Outlook and the MS Word icons are too similar when minimised on the task bar.
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I had to "upgrade" my 80 yr old uncle to a Windows 11 laptop this past fall. The Mail app there was really not tested on someone who is 80. Yeah it might look cool and people that are terminally online will understand it, but to someone who is used to Outlook Express? Complete mess
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Based on their prior patterns they might hire such people but would not listen to them because the people in power in tech do not care about people at all, and seem to hate them.

They keep firing their product safety teams for a reason. What do they care if an old person gets scammed?
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My early years in tech support gave me rabid opinions on UI design and user friendliness. I am perpetually let down by tech bros.
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A task force of people who do tech support for their own products would be a godsend, but then they'd have to actually listen to the people they consider to be beneath them, so it won't happen.
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as someone who deals with this literally daily as my job, thank you!
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Any email application developer mobile or otherwise still doesn’t get this fundamental flaw.

bsky.app/profile/benrattigan.com/post/3mftozztgi22y
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💯. There are so many more things they could do to remove visual clutter than obscuring the most important part of an email
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I wish they're stop hiding pretty much *everything* behind yet another click on the down arrow thing of even worse, the "..." that's completely unnecessarily hiding most of the text.
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The customer does not want that feature. They will like what we give them.
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This, alone is a reason to keep a desktop email app that shows you the addresses by hovering your mouse!
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Even the web version of gmail still shows the address, it's just the stupid mobile app that they hid it in
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I use Proton and I definitely prefer the desktop app, even though it's not perfect or anything. I will read emails on my phone, but I no longer do anything other than that from my phone. I'll go to my desktop to do that.
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I think a lot of people are less familiar with the concept of tooltips than you might think. It should just show you the damn email address.
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Similarly, am I the only one who's annoyed by the miniquest I have to undertake whenever I want to see the "to" address? When did that start being standard in every email app?

> To: me
Yeah no shit? That's crazy.
But is it professional me, online me, middle-school-spam-email me, or what?
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As someone who has emails from another inbox forwarded to my primary one, I completely agree.
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I also DEEPLY dislike YouTube adds that shows some of my personal information pre-filled in a mock contact request form. I know Alphabet has my information, I gave it to them, but seeing it inside a third party advertisement even inside YouTube app feels more like a threat than convenience.
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I've never heard of this, but I use ad blockers. Do yourself a favor and run YouTube with a VPN and/or Brave Browser.
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I go through something similar at work where they train us to hover over a hyperlink to see where it points to, but then they use a service that scans and replaces URLs, so we literally can't see where it actually points to.
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my work just started doing that too! so stupid
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Don't forget when you're using Microsoft products, you can go to outlook.com which, once logged in, switches to my-sharepoint.com and/or microsoftonline.com, and probably a few others.
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I have more than one email address. Sometimes just finding out which email address something was sent to me on feels like an exercise in patience and I’m *good* at these things. But no, designer time has to be on making the layout transparent and even less readable apparently.
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I also really dislike if email apps don't show when a email fails the DKIM check and may have a spoofed address field
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I work in banking an the number of older people that fall for scams because they don't know how to look at an email address is very sad. These companies really should prioritize safety over appearances.
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I work at a drug store that sells giftcards. I save the old folks in my town at least $5000 a week by denying their transactions and educating them. Its fucked
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My bank sends emails sometimes that say to click a link to enlarge my credit limit. They just have no idea what they're doing.
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It is amazing how many pieces of information that I regularly need are deeply obfuscated just for the sake of "UI neatness," the other one that drives me nuts is how hard it is to get precise absolute timestamps (rather than rounded relative ones, e.g. "one year ago") on so many platforms
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(Incidentally, this is why IMO anyone posting an April Fools video on YT should edit the title on April 5 or so to include the date, because when people watch down the line that timestamp will just say "three years ago" and will not give the context to go "oh hah I see what this is")
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Don't forget obfuscating the protocol (http[s]) and subdomains in browser URL bars. Why are you hiding this information?
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Current UX philosophy really confuses me. Are there no real UX designers at companies anymore? It's all form over function, but even the form is boring. At least when skeuomorphism was popular they had excuses for why things were designed certain ways.
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Yea, try printing the email. I think print should be achievable but if it does not have full email addresses it does not serve the purpose.
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That'll preach
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Not being able to see the destination of links is even worse imo.
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I had to DIG to find the from on a sus email yesterday. I'm 44 and I'm a network engineer. I've been dealing with this shit my whole life. Sometimes literally for my job. And it was difficult for me to find the sender name in Gmails new mobile layout. And the new wave of fraudster knows it.
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I just moved my whole family to fastmail and more spam and scams get through their filters than with gmail. That combined with having to click the arrow next to “Microsoft” to see the “fbwmeixuh@2dnwis.biz” email address I think is going to result in a lot more “this real?” forwards from my parents.
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I switched over to proton a year ago. Great spam filter, end to end encrypted and ...🥁 does show the full sender without extra clicks
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I'm the target of hundreds of "Trezor" (a bitcoin wallet device) phishing attempts like I think many people who bought one are and some make it into the real inbox, DKIM verified (because third-party was hacked)

IMHO it undermines DKIM outright to not show "Trezor" is noreply@ic.africa
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It’s INFURIATING!! Bad HIG that are not followed piss me the F off. The damn guidelines existed for a REASON!!
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Yes! This is sooo annoying.
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That means you, Apple
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The move from showing the actual email address which is checked using the Sender Policy Framework to detect spoofed addresses, to just like the display name they set which have no spoofing protection is one of the very dumb things about modern email
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Scams suck. We created our free scam detector to help older users and those who just need a little extra help learning to identify scams.
www.malwarebytes.com/solutions/scam-guard
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Hiding the email addresses from the email app smells of a decision made by a techbro, who thinks everyone too stupid to understand what an email address is
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Not only that. I get multiple emails per week of three different shared accounts in an institution that uses the name of the institution (and not the different accounts) as the "to". The only way to differentiate the sender is by expanding it to see the email of the sender, and it's quite annoying.
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I am in silicon valley and in the IT field, and you are absolutely correct with this.

The other one that I see as problematic is how major browsers now hide the "https://" part of the URL in the URL bar, and make you have to dig to get the actual cert details.

None of this helps the end users.
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Even in other other areas like Network or Drive activity lights that have disappeared. I am staring at this account setup page for a new laptop at work for 5 minutes seemingly stuck on a step. Having an indicator like an updown arrow for a network or a drive light would help to know if it stalled
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We have ended up in a full form over function situation with a lot of tech.
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