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Gmail, We Need to Talk

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Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#111

Post by bad_user »

csomar wrote: post #83

If you haven't already, you are better leaving Gmail 1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address. 2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left…

I'm an ex Google Apps user and now a happy FastMail user. I left Gmail for many reasons, some technical (poor IMAP support, unhappy with the available clients) and some ideological (I don't want to vote with my wallet for monocultures). However ...

> Have your own domain for emails

Gmail allows you to own your domain. You just subscribe for Google Apps, at $5 / user / month, which is reasonable.

> If you don't pay for the product, you are the product

Well, with Google Apps you very much pay for the product. But I don't agree with such thoughts not even for the free Gmail. Yeah, it's a cute line, but has nothing to do with reality, the reality being that products being sold have to be produced, the essence of capitalism being to lower the costs and increase the scale, turning sold products into commodities and users, by being people, are anything but commodities, being in fact entities that in comparison with hardware or whatever, can always get pissed off or switch to a competitor. Such lines also assume a very simplistic view of the producer / consumer relationship. Cash changing hands is nice, but in our world an ecosystem is much more complex than that, much like how in nature there's a very complex and life creating relationship between predators, cattle and grass, each link in that food-chain being essential for the survival of everything else. And the genius of Google has been to recognize that the welfare of users is paramount to their success, though unfortunately they seem to forget that ever since Google+ and Vic Gundotra.

More realistic would be to say that a zero price tag is in fact subsidized with something else, as there's always an implicit cost. The cost of the free Gmail is lock-in. And just like in nature where monocultures are unhealthy for everybody, free Gmail is hurting competition and worse, they are dropping the ball on standards. So Android is my favorite mobile OS, but can you believe that Android doesn't have a modern, well designed and standard email client? I mean, you're good as long as you're a Gmail user. Exchange also works. But for plain IMAP? Say goodbye to push email and to basic functionality, like archiving by swiping. They should also be ashamed that Android doesn't support CalDAV or CardDAV out of the box, though granted you can buy some add-ons.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#113

Post by aninhumer »

lmm wrote: post #46
icebraining wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.

You used to be able to just click the directions tab and fill in the from and to in the textually-labelled boxes on the left. Now you have to provide it the incantation in the order it wants; in particular you must put the destination in first and then go back and put the start point after. I don't even know if you can do "via" any more, never mind how. And it seems incapable of remembering what mode of transport I w…

You can do via, but not for public transport, and indeed it magically hides the add destination button if you're not in one of the modes it supports (including if you're in the auto-mode and it's suggested a public transport route).

I can kind of see their reasoning, since public transport is often time dependent, but often I don't care about specifics, I just want to get an idea what links exist, and how long I'm going to spend in transport visiting a bunch of places.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#114

Post by napoleond »

PhilWright wrote: post #22
soneca wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sole responsible for acquisition on a startup and I solely (for now) use direct cold email (it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam). I only use plain text emails. I don't even use email tracking so that hidden pixel doesn't trigger any annoying warning on the email client that ruins the experience.

Sending unsolicited email to public addresses in order to sell something is spam. Calling it 'cold email' to make it sound like a legitimate process does not change the fact you are spamming.

That's not true, by either the letter of the law or the spirit of it. I own a business, and I post my email publicly because I want people to contact me. Some of those people will be selling me things--I want that! It's true that I end up with a lot of spam as a result, and that sucks, but it's better than never receiving unsolicited business email.

Sending unsolicited email to consumers is, indeed, spam. B2B is different.

EDIT: CANSPAM (US) is a bit ambiguous on this point. (Helpful blog post: http://customer.io/blog/Send-email-without-unsubscribe-link-...) CASL, its Canadian equivalent (I'm Canadian) is very clear on this point, though--unsolicited B2B to a publicly posted email address is a-ok, as long as it's not automated.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#115

Post by icebraining »

andyana wrote: post #70
icebraining wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is it difficult and error prone now? I frankly cannot see it. What steps do you take, and where do you stumble?

I can't run through it right now, but I guess there are simply too many steps to go from address to navigation. It used to be, as best I recall, input address -> click navigate. The error part comes in from making me visually choose from a list of addresses after I have already put in a specific address (search is not needed). The difficult part comes in to play when I am trying to get somewhere and the app is making…

But you don't need to search. Open maps.google.com, then type the address and click on the arrow; it'll open the two directions input screen with the destination already filled in. Now you can just choose the origin (e.g. click on "my location") and it'll show you the route.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#116

Post by rdtsc »

rconti wrote: post #23

GMail, we need to talk. We need to talk about how substring searches do not work, 11 years after your launch. We need to talk about how you've slowly engineered out everything that was good and unique about GMail. We need to talk about how you "flattened" the style, removed colors from threaded messages, and just decided to use shades of grey everywhere. We need to talk about how difficult it is to tell one message f…

I see something like this happening:

Imagine this: you are Google. Raking in billions. PhD level scientists are hired to mop floors, and serve coffee to everyone. You hire top level designers, pay them $250k/year and tell them to improve Gmail.

And they do...Gmail gets better. You make more billions, hire more designers, pay them more and ... tell them to work on Gmail.

You now have 10 designers, "designing" GMail. Come end of year performance review all those highly paid, world class professionals will want to say "I did , , and I deserve a raise". Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?". So, they go to town and re-design it every 6 months. Review comes and well they all can claim they have successfully re-designed, flattened, styles etc, added custom iframe, windows, etc.

This happens with software teams, that is why so much software is re-written, people don't get rewarded for maintaining as much as for creating. So they have to create, and when things get crowded, that means tearing down and then re-create.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#117

Post by magicalist »

softbuilder wrote: post #95
icebraining wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions". How is it hard? EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.

Maybe GMaps is just polarizing software that seems awesome to some people and awful to others? Unless you're a Googler and/or on the Maps team? :) One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird. Another thing that is just bafflingly absent is that GMaps doesn't…

> One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.

Works for me, and that's definitely one I've never explicitly set. According to my settings, the tab search just redirects to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#118

Post by mschuster91 »

It's not just Google Mail that doesn't support proper HTML emails.

The Android mail client doesn't, the iOS mailclient doesn't, Outlook actually feature-retarded between 2010 and 2013, most webmailers break on anything that's not tables with inline styles, Lotus Notes Webmail is actually fairly good but unfortunately depending on the platform the full Notes client uses either its horrid internal engine or something provided by the OS that may actually be IE7 (shit, you design a beautiful newsletter for Mac Notes, and it falls apart on Windows; also weird weird suboptions hidden deep inside Notes make it balk on anything but color/background-color/height/width)...

The only mail client that can render full-featured HTML5 newsletters is Thunderbird.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#119

Post by rconti »

archmikhail wrote: post #92
rconti wrote: post #23

GMail, we need to talk. We need to talk about how substring searches do not work, 11 years after your launch. We need to talk about how you've slowly engineered out everything that was good and unique about GMail. We need to talk about how you "flattened" the style, removed colors from threaded messages, and just decided to use shades of grey everywhere. We need to talk about how difficult it is to tell one message f…

May I add, the redesigned YouTube app on iOS is horrendous. These UI regressions have to catch up to Google eventually, right?

I honestly believe there's a revolving door of Product Managers at Google that come in, decide to leave their "mark" on a product by making a bunch of arbitrary changes, then move on to destroy other products.

Hard to complain when they're free, but... I do my best.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#120

Post by mschuster91 »

mvdwoord wrote: post #64
CM30 wrote: post #16

Oh god, HTML email. Gmail and Outlook literally make coding these things an absolute hell due to their dreadful lack of supports for any form of standard, and the author is damn well spot on about it. Indeed, the only good thing I can say about Gmail is that they didn't try to use the Microsoft Word engine to render HTML like Outlook did. The way HTML email is set up and the table filled soup like code that's needed…

Gmail and Outlook? I had to create some HTML email reports to be read in Lotus Notes. It made me extremely sad as Notes invariably does.

Be thankful you hadn't to target Notes, Thunderbird and Outlook like I had to once. I still have the occasional bad dreams from this job.
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