61–70 of 102 posts
If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you: GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use. Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText. Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change p…
If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you: GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use. Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText. Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change p…
You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0]. It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS,…
It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse.
The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account, needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat.
On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well).
As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though, we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations).
The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :)"
The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html
I'm just waiting for Matrix to get E2E going... For now, XMPP works well enough.
The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed. Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens. [1]: https://matrix.org [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html
I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet. What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there email servers aimed at Linux noobs?
Not really and the whole thing is a huge pain the ass if you want your emails to be received by Gmail/Yahoo/etc. recipients.
I know from experience that I have to smarthost, as Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook.com reject silently any mail that come direct from my mail server. It's a pain, but there are solutions out there.
I see a lot of people asking why not club this feature (and Duo) into Hangouts. I use Hangouts too, but it looks like they'd grown too complicated for a common user who wanted to 'just' do a quick text chat or a quick video chat. Hangouts had chat, SMS, video, phone calling and what not. While I didn't see any problem at all with that and found that good (except the UI that was still not good), probably it's a little…
If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you: GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use. Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText. Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change p…
You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0]. It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS,…
Just tried it out and to my disappointment, it doesn't allow me to send a file other than images to other users. Google engineers if you are listening please add the ability to send docs and files to other users!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet. What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.
Email allows just enough delay for antispam to do its work in, plus a whole range of antispam solutions involving backoff. Chat requires much lower latency. Any federated/distributed chat system would have to deal with spam and abuse upfront in its design, or people would just migrate back towards controlled systems without those problems. There's a second issue of where the chat continuity should be kept across devi…
One solution is to only check for spam if the sender is not in your address book. And with chat, you usually have to allow somebody in your address book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.
Are there email servers aimed at Linux noobs?
I've seen this mentioned a few times on HN: https://mailinabox.email/
No experience with it myself.